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Last active August 30, 2019 09:39
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Thoughts on colors in the terminal
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notes.md

Here is an idea: how about we drastically modify the way the coloring is done in terminals and in text in general?

Reasoning:

  1. Right now it is really hard to make the text you write colorful.
  2. The control flow for the terminal is quite convoluted - most programs stop coloring output if the pipe doesn't lead to tty, so your bash scripts end up looking like a mess.
  3. External highlighters (or absence thereof) can change the coloring (of your code for example), which may be not desired.

What do we have?

  1. ANSI codes. Works only in terminals with color support (which is like 100% of them), works even better with terminals with true color support (which is a bit less than 100% of them). By the way, this gist and many of its forks contain a list of terminals supporting true color.

    Example: This \E[31mpart of text\E[0m is colored in red.

    \E there represents the escape key-code.

  2. CSS. Web-only system which is fairy good though also fairy complex. The applications are spread a bit wider than just web-pages, because electron exists. The biggest downside being that it directly interacts only with html, and no human writes directly in html.

    Example: This <span style="color:red">part of text</span> is colored red.

To be continued...

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