And the developers answer to this loss of control is to create multiple colour schemes and allow the user to configure the app. Which then means their users have to set up their terminal defaults and then configure every fscking app that ignores those terminal defaults(!!!) instead of defining their required colour schemes once in the terminal.

People use the terminal not because it’s pretty but because they find a text interface more efficient. If you want to make pretty things then build a web frontend. But please do not break my terminal because you feel the need to impose on me your own favourite colours of the hour.

Please just don't. This is not the web.

Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.

Speaking for the group of people I know and work with, we don't want a "consistent experience" and hate TUIs that try to manhandle the color palette. Use color sparingly and with intention. Respect that different people have different settings.

Is there anything you can do with that information though? This piece of information only becomes useful if you know what colour the background is. And you should also know the colour of text and everything else.

What if the background is muted violet? What if the background is white and the foreground is muted violet? I don't want you to ever use "muted violet" in my terminal, since you have no idea what colours there are in my terminal.

I would posit then that this article simply doesn't apply to you at all. The feature being described is targetted at users who are effectively developing their own schemes (albeit in a rather simplified automated manner). If I'm taking something off the shelf, I'm using the appropriate recommended base16. I have no expectation that a wild base16 is going to align with any 3rd-party's curated scheme.

I do understand that this logic isn't always going to click with people given the differing contexts of a terminal-wide -vs- app-specific (i.e. vim) approach, but again: that disparity seems either a legacy issue (caused by things like this 16-256 mis-alignment) OR simply a philosophical difference (whereby people who customise at the term level shouldn't at the app level & vice-versa).

Instead of aiming to provide a "consistent experience", you should instead prioritize providing consistent functionality, while avoiding impeding users' control over their own particular experience.

If the user sets a sensible 16 color palette though, many old utils could look great out of the box. I'm enticed by the idea.

I personally prefer light themes everywhere, both in IDEs and in the terminal. I thought that just choosing my own color scheme for 0-15 would give me the color pallette that I prefer, but because app developers like you for some reason decided that you know better what colors do I prefer, this is actually not enough. I also have to configure each TUI application separately to have the color scheme that I like.

And I do not understand why people do it. Like, why would you deliberately break the universal customization system and force users to use your own, specific to your app?

Honesty, each time I encounter an app that uses 16-255 colors, I feel like someone just violated my personal space and intruded into my chosen color pallette with their own colors that don't fit.

I didn't read in fully, but what I was thinking in my head is not that we would just totally replace the rest of the colors with arbitrary palette. But that we would sub in better versions of the palette that also used user colors as the base. What was magenta is derived from what the user picked from blue and red.

There's always been such tension between design/creative and users. Apps & designers want their own brand identity, want creative control to make things just so. And are willing to throw user preference & desire on the pyre to get that exacting control. Personally that was always rubbed me extremely the wrong way; I would way rather allow some weirdness & funkiness in, if it leaves the user in control. But I understand the risk aversion, understand the Murphy's law corporatism that makes people and companies want to build strong laws that forbid anything but strictly approved systems, for fear that things go wrong. I understand. But I also things that's a dogshit world to live in.

By the way, the terminal foreground and background colors are independent of the standard 16 colors, which complicates things.

Perhaps instead of the application overriding the setting, it could be done with an environment var, so the user can easily override it if the mapping messes with the look/usability of the program.

urxvt prominently doesn't (fully)

At the currently known limits of physics where Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Abbe's Limit, Quantum Shot Noise and such become our sensing barriers, we suspect we need only about 6000 bits per pixel to represent a digital twin of the electromagnetic field of the sensor-covered volume of space. At 60 fps, that is 1.8 Zettabits per second. Scale out data volume accordingly when using using 18.5 sexdecillion fps (Planck time fps).

What surprises me is these "limits of the fabric of reality as we know it" mind experiments fairly concretely point the way on the many roads towards Kardashev Scale implementations, and is not that different from Archimedes' "Sand Reckoner" and Hindu cosmological Kalpa time scales. History doesn't quite repeat, but rhymes yet again.

I am not colorblind, and have the same experience. It's made worse by the fact that different apps use colors differently, so if I find a theme that works well for some clis and tuis, there will be others that will have unreadably low contrast with the default theme. So I have to tweak the colorscheme for each application as well.