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Comment by j4cobgarby | Hacker News Reader

Use only default (white/black), red for bad, green for good. If you need more than that, like vim or whatever, then maybe a 'fullscreen' TUI is better, with a specified background and foreground. For CLI tools, I'm not sure if I prefer more colours.

The CSS to make the terminals look like iTerm was smooth, to the point I read them as screenshots.

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Hard disagree on the red/green. Use whatever you think appropriate and make it user configurable.

It's a CLI app, it's already configurable. Every good terminal emulator lets you set custom palettes.

>Every good terminal emulator lets you set custom palettes

Not differently for each program's output.

Which is a good reason to stick with the de-facto standard of red for bad and green for good.

unless you're colour blind

If you're color blind, you change the palette in your terminal emulator so "red" and "green" become different colors you can distinguish. It even works for rarer forms of color blindness. This works best when people follow the de-facto standard.

Red here does not mean #ff0000. it means color 1. in the 4 bit colors palette

> Red here does not mean #ff0000

For you maybe.

"Look it is not gray on gray is black #777777 on white #333333". /s

If for something unrelated to good/bad looks good, I'm using red. Ditto for green.

Sure, if it was a status indicator and I used red for "good", I can see the point. But over the last few years I've had too many people tell me "Don't use red, people will think something is wrong" for things not semantically tied to good/bad.

People wear red clothes. They buy red cars. They eat red food. They date red heads. Red is OK.

> red for bad, green for good

8% of men of Northern European descent (and 0.4% of women) are red-green colorblind. That'd be a terrible choice. Use blue-orange, blue-red, or purple-green.

This approach is worse. Use red and green like everyone else and the user can choose their terminal color palette to differentiate in a way that works for them. Then it works the same across all commands. If you're the odd one out, you're adding more mental overhead for the user, not less.

You are ignoring that most people already have a cultural understanding of the colors red and green. Changes done for accessibility should never making things worse for the average user.

Red/green is semantic in these cases. They’re user configurable in almost all terminals, so there’s no real accessibility issue. I tend to associate blue with decorative accent, yellow with info/warning text, and cyan and magenta for really fancy stuff.

Red/green has no inherent semantics. It has the semantics that you assign it. If you choose to assign it meaning that disenfranchises 8% of men using your system, that's your choice, but it is not a good one.

Cultural semantics (diff tools, build tools,…: green/addition/ok, red/removal/error). And people with color blindness can alter the colors to something they can differentiate. And in the ansi sequences, they are actually numbers.

The standard terminal palette is only 16 colors. Even if you compress them all into the green-to-blue color range, it's still possible to distinguish all 16. The user can change "red" and "green" to whatever they like in the terminal preferences and then every 16-color app will be accessible with no additional effort from anybody.

More importantly, dont use color as sole source of information. Strikethrough, emoji or ok / bad can also be used.

Emojis aren't 7-bit clean. They're hard to type. They don't mean things the same way words do. `foo | grep -i error` communicates intent better than `foo | grep :-/` or whatever goofy hieroglyph someone chose instead of, like, a word with clearly defined meaning.

In my experience with live codebases, "error" or "warning" rarely mean the same thing to the same person, but admittedly you're much more likely to guess that they're in use as opposed to crying-green-clown emoji

> They're hard to type

I'd like to recommend rofimoji. I have it bound to a hotkey, so whenever I want to type an emoji, I just hit that hotkey and then a window pops up with my most recent emoji already visible at the top. Then I start typing in words that describe the emoji that I want like "crying" and it filters the list. Finally I select one and it pastes it into whatever text box I had selected before I hit the hotkey. My only complaint is I wish it worked for all unicode codepoints instead of just the emoji.

Yes that's why I also mentioned text labels. (strikethrough ansi codes aren't also fun to type). Besides, where are you needing 7but clean data ? Isn't that a narrow use case ?

> narrow use case?

It's the robustness principle. "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." A CLI author shouldn't assume support for UTF-8.

ok in that context use error or ok, just dont use color as ~10% of ppl have an issue with seeing colors perfectly (that includes people with epaper displays)

> They're hard to type.

Globe key + E on Mac, Windows key + period on Windows, Ctrl + period on GNOME, Super key + period on KDE, yada yada.

Color is cultural. Red is associated with good in China

Context here matters, red finds its way into Chinese forbidden or warning signs quite often.

Eh, LS_COLORS is sometimes useful once the meanings are in your subconscious.

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