Default :terminal palette colors could have better contrast in GUIs

[craigmac]

Originally posted by @craigmac in #26857 (comment)

The current :terminal palette colors when using neovim from a gui results in poor contrast, in particular the blue on black combination is difficult to read.

Can we improve the nvim --clean experience for GUI users, like in neovide, and only when has('gui_running') (or however we detect that a GUI is attached/shown). My preference would be to use the default colorscheme shipped with 0.10 as the palette, as it provides a unified look and it has a better readability. Barring that, something like Chris Kempson's 'default dark' (recent Alacritty's switched to this from Tomorrow Night) is battle-tested and works better than the default xterm palette.

[craigmac]

Some images from Neovide 0.13 running Nvim 0.10 branch on macOS latest:

Example at the bottom here of blue fg on black bg issue:

Blue on black issue here much more obvious, also white on green combo is poor:

[justinmk]

Isn't that controlled by $LSCOLORS or some other shell-related env var?

[clason]

I agree that my "terminal colors should match parent shell" objection does not apply here, I am still hesitant to use the Neovim colors for terminal colors, for the following reason: Unlike Vim highlight groups, these colors (at least the first eight) are named by the ANSI standard (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white). And since the official Neovim branding is so minimal, we can't match these expectations.

[justinmk]

And since the official Neovim branding is so minimal, we can't match these expectations.

Nonsense. There is no requirement that the colors match the names, only that they are distinguishable.

[clason]

https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-48_5th_edition_june_1991.pdf (page 61-62)

[justinmk]

What part are you quoting? I don't see any requirement on those pages about the colors needing to match the names. Otherwise they would not be configurable.

[clason]

The named list of colors. I never said anything about hard requirements, only about expectations. (And I already regret saying anything at all.)