This is a page from an upcoming zine called "The Secret Rules of the Terminal".
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read the transcript!
your terminal emulator has 16 configurable colours
| normal | bright | |
|---|---|---|
| black | 0 | 0 |
| red | 1 | 1 |
| green | 2 | 2 |
| yellow | 3 | 3 |
| blue | 4 | 4 |
| purple | 5 | 5 |
| cyan | 6 | 6 |
| white | 7 | 7 |
these are called “ANSI colours”
you can configure them in your terminal emulator’s settings
OR
run a script that prints escape codes to magically set up your colours
https://wzrd.page/scripts
(my favourite way!)
programs can use ANSI colours by printing an escape code
echo -e "\033[34m blue text"
3 means “normal fg colour”
4 means “blue”
the default ANSI colours often have bad contrast
ls --color often displays directories in ANSI “blue” which can look like this:
[bar of illegibly dark text against a dark background, which says “can you read this?”]
ANSI “yellow” on white also often has bad contrast
“minimum contrast”
Picking ANSI colours which always have good contrast is impossible.
the only real solution is to use a terminal emulator which has a “minimum contrast” feature (like iTerm or kitty) which will fix contrast issues
usually if a program is writing to a pipe, it’ll disable colours
$ grep blah file.txt | less
grep, represented by a box with a smiley face: better turn off colours so that I don’t accidentally show someone `^[[34ntext here]
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