Render bold text in bright color

[tywtyw2002]

Is possible to add the feature to render bold text in bright color.

The iTerm2 and Terminal already have this feature to render bold text in bright color.

[kovidgoyal]

dup of #197

[ckabalan]

I appreciate the work @kovidgoyal does, but much to his annoyance I'm also going to chime in here to say the lack of this configurable setting and the hard lined approach to NOT implementing this totally optional feature has lost me as a new user.

Despite it being "stupid" or "broken ass usage", it is a common feature among every terminal emulator I've used and there is no good reason this shouldn't be a configurable off-by-default option. Even if it is not part of a formal spec it has become an informal feature people expect, and Kitty should support it.

Moving to Kitty from iTerm2 proves to be a completely positive improvement in my terminal, except the lack of this feature loses me.

Will stay engaged and check back if there is at least a positive direction for this feature.

[josser]

@kovidgoyal I've read #197 issue and it looks like there was some sort of misunderstanding
tl;dr: People want to use bright for bold, not bold for bright.

Original ticket creator wants to have an option which makes all text which is already bold to be rendered with bright colors.
And you understand this request as: 'make all bold text bright instead of bold'.
This is not the same. By adding such option users just want to increase 'boldness' of already bold text. It doesn't expected to replace bold with bright.
The reason for this is probably because of usage 'dark' styled color themes.
When we have dark text on light bg it's enough to have bold or regular option.
But when it's light text (usaully not really light) on dark bg it's just have not enough brightness even if it's bold.

[kovidgoyal]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 03:42:45AM -0700, Dmitry Chirkin wrote: The reason for this is probably because of usage 'dark' styled color themes. When we have dark text on light bg it's enough to have bold or regular option. But when it's light text (usaully not really light) on dark bg it's just have not enough brightness even if it's bold.

So set the colors to whatever floats your boat in kitty.conf. That escape code changes the FONT FACE from regular to heavy weight. It *DOES NOT* affect colors. Adding an option to make it affect colors means that anyone using the escape code now has no clue what it does.

[josser]

What you said, forced me to read some articles, to understand how all this things works.
I'll left this link here: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/BuildyourownCommandLinewithANSIescapecodes.html
Maybe this will help other people to understand why bold and bright is different things and why it's bad idea to mix them in such way.
Thank you!

[ckabalan]

Wanted to bring everyone's attention to PR #3234 (Add setting to render bold text with bright colors). I didn't submit the PR, but I did find it when I was going to add this feature myself. This PR implements the functionality we want, the code is done, but has been rejected. Looks like the PR submitter has decided to maintain KittyPatch, a fork of Kitty with just this modification. All of the source code changes between the fork and master look innocent. Mostly link changes to the fork repo and of course the "bold-shift" functionality to make bold ANSI codes both bold AND bright! Also, the funny bandaid on the icon. Nice touch.

Anyway I've been able to build and run this repo with great success, even submitted a PR to integrate the latest master changes from here. Cool stuff and glad to see open source working as intended, sort of a Vim vs NeoVim kind of debacle...

Thanks again for doing 99.999% of the base work for this awesome project @kovidgoyal . Wish you would re-consider accepting this feature. Obviously people are passionate enough about it to make forks, compile code themselves, and track your upstream changes.

Edit: July 29th, 2021 - KittyPatch appears abandoned. I've submitted multiple PRs trying to keep it up to speed with Kitty but none are accepted. The difference between Kitty and KittyPatch has become too great so I created my own for here. Compile the brightcolors branch from source, add bold_is_bright yes to your kitty.conf. I will continue to update this comment as the situation changes.

TLDR: This functionality exists. Someone submitted a PR but no longer maintains the fork. I am now maintaining a fork at ckabalan/kitty. Compile the brightcolors branch from source, add bold_is_bright yes to your kitty.conf. The README has historical details and further instructions.

[Jan200101]

I agree with Kovid that its usually wrong to change the color of bold text, but outright refusing to even add a config option for something that is widely accepted in other Terminals including those from major projects (Konsole, gnonme-terminal, etc.) seems childish to me.

I hope that he changes his mind at some point

[Pound-Hash]

Using bold for bright colors is a very, very bad decision. It means that no software can use bold fonts, since bold now has no well defined meaning.

I agree, thank you.

@kovidgoyal

[Pesky01]

I also agree. Doesn't really make sense to not have an option that mimics other terminal emulators. If you care about losing the definition of bold, then dont use the option. I dont care, so why cant I use the feature? No one else would be affected by this.