🚀 Add option to override terminal's background color

[jc00ke]

(yadm just forwards, and I tested it with bare git too)

Am I doing something silly? This is with delta 0.1.1 on Linux with kitty 0.17.3

[jc00ke]

Hmm, even delta --list-themes looks off...

[dandavison]

Hi @jc00ke, thanks for opening an issue! It may be that I've done something that doesn't make sense or is surprising people. Currently, delta only alters the background color in added/removed lines. Otherwise, the background color is whatever your terminal emulator is producing. Is it that that's violating your expectations?

[dandavison]

the background color is whatever your terminal emulator is producing.

I believe that bat takes the same approach: sharkdp/bat#339 (comment)

Does this make sense? There have also been questions about it in #87. (Wouldn't it be rather visually jarring for delta/bat to produce different background colors from what your terminal is set to?)

[jc00ke]

Ah, that makes sense, and yes, that's violating my expectations 😉
I had the expectation that the background would match the selected theme, that way the highlighted line and colors would adhere to the theme better. I didn't realize bat does that as well, and it makes sense, but it also makes sense to think of it like someone setting a piece of paper on my desk. The paper's color shouldn't match the color of my desk.

As for a jarring experience, yes, totally. I had light set to test the background, but I'll switch to dark since that's my default Solarized variant. For a while I ran vimdiff with the light variant just to really make it clear I was in diffing mode. But I don't personally mind 😜

[gpressutto5]

It would be great to have an option to change the background for not changed lines too. This way we could use light themes for diff while still using a dark theme for terminal.

[dandavison]

@jc00ke @gpressutto5 @natsumi @lightspeedbriefs

The master branch of delta now allows the background color to be set, overriding the terminal. Please see the write-up in #205 for full details!

Here's an example showing how to use a light theme with a dark terminal background, as @gpressutto5 suggested:

delta --theme=OneHalfLight --minus-style 'syntax auto' --minus-emph-style='syntax auto'
      --zero-style 'syntax white'
      --plus-style 'syntax auto' --plus-emph-style 'syntax auto'
      --hunk-header-style='syntax white' --hunk-header-decoration-style='black box'

To build delta from source:

You'll need to install the rust tools.

git pull origin master
cargo build --release
./target/release/delta --help

Closing this because I think it's fixed, but as always please re-open if not.