default color scheme: Make commands "normal" color#10758
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This makes the default colorscheme less colorful for two reasons: 1. It makes it a little less "angry fruit salad" 2. Some terminals (like Microsoft's Windows Terminal) have a terrible blue default that contrasts badly against a black background The alternative is to make *parameters* "normal" and give commands the current parameter color (cyan). But I've seen cyan be quite blue and quite green depending on the terminal, so I don't want to rely on it.
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Another problem we have is that the "quoted string" color is yellow, and that's often bad on a light background. We could change that to green instead, which is already the "end" color (used for
And on gnome console:
Yes, this is a downside of the palette system, and a clear deficiency in these terminals' default palette. We can't, in general, always pick colors that are always visible everywhere. But these are fairly prominent terminals and we can try to make it acceptable more often. |
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We failed to implement something that tells us the difference between a uvar being the default color or user-set.
it's true that cyan varies but does that matter? It's always readable I think, so making parameters normal sounds The same problem with blue colors applies to |
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I like normal parameters as well. I've been using that in my color scheme for a while bright yellow is unreadable in many terminals but green feels like too strong of a color for However, green might work well for |
In this case, that's entirely fine. Changing the colorscheme is easy enough, so if someone is sticking with the default they're okay with it, meaning there's no need to fix it for them.
That is a possibility, but many parameters won't be "param" color - they'll be quoted or error or redirections or whathaveyou. So there's not as much difference as you think. I think I prefer the smaller change of only changing the command/keyword color.
Gonna be honest I have no faith in xterm changing its default palette.
We don't know how close "purple" is to "normal", especially given that "normal" can be anything from pure black to pure white. (also canonically it's "magenta", we accept "purple" as an alias)
From what I can tell, there is currently no problem with the autosuggestion color, so I don't want to change it. Grey is the ideal choice there - we keep saying it is "greyed out". One big problem here is that it is essentially impossible to make a good colorscheme with these constraints. We quite literally want it to work on white and black backgrounds and only have 16 colors to pick from that we do not even know. So, since we can only really guess and try, I don't want to make too many changes here. |
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I didn't test it much but it sometimes feels a bit strange that command and non-special params are so different. How about Anyway, that's not a blocker, I'd be fine with this patch as-is.
No. People overwhelmingly stick to bad defaults even though they're easy to change. There's not enough time for that. It's our job. Fish is doing something very foolish here. Of course this is an unrelated issue.
There are others like Windows Terminal, I'm sure they are interested in having readable |
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Alright, let's merge this as-is, and see if we can find any improvements later. |
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Just gonna share my opinion as an end-user and not a maintainer, it was a little strange to me to install fish on a new machine for the first time in a while and see something different to what I've grown used to. Like it or not, I think that generally users tend to associate the default color scheme with the shell itself and while I wouldn't go so far as to say this change has made anybody distrust fish, it just feels like a weirdly unnecessary change to me at least. Just my two cents though, obviously I can very easily just change those colors back to what they were |
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This makes the default colorscheme less colorful for two reasons:
The alternative is to make parameters "normal" and give commands the current parameter color (cyan). But I've seen cyan be quite blue and quite green depending on the terminal, so I don't want to rely on it.
Remember that our default theme uses 16 palette colors only and should work for light and dark terminals if at all possible.
Some screenshots in various terminals with the default color palette (konsole, kitty, gnome console IIRC, but I can't tell which is which) - the middle colorscheme is what I'm proposing, the last is the alternative:
And in xterm:
Notice how the blue in xterm is pretty hard to read, so any terminal that took its color palette will also be hard to read. Of course there are zero guarantees here, the terminal can use whichever colors it wants, but you'd be hard pressed to find a terminal that sets "normal" to unreadable on whatever background, and I'd be fine calling that a bug in that terminal.
I also believe that this makes the default colorscheme more pleasant simply by making it less busy.
TODOs: