The good thing with the 256c palette is that colors in the 16-255 range are fixed, which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet and so on. This is very useful for colorscheme developers because it allows us to provide a pretty good and consistent experience across the widest range of terminal emulators.

If the 256c palette is generated from a -- potentially wild -- 16c palette then there is no guarantee anymore that 146 will indeed be the 146 I expect.

Turning 16-255 into the same kind of minefield as 0-15 seems very misguided to me.

I know 16 colours is limiting, but one of my biggest pet peeves is CLI / TUI developers creating their own custom themes using colours outside of that because odds are, they’re going to generate a colour scheme that is harder to read for a lot of people with visual impairments, people who prefer a white or coloured background for eye comfort, people are dyslexic and find non-black backgrounds easier to read, and others with visual difficulties, reading difficulties, or those who just like a different colour scheme per project or environment they’re working in so they can multitask more easily.

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.

> provide a [...] consistent experience

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.

I'm sorry, but I find this mentality from app developers extremely annoying.

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.

Terminals like iTerm2 have had a Minimum Contrast for a while that messes with (foreground) colours, sometimes very badly.

There are escape codes that can re-define palette entries. Usually including the 16-255 range.

This will be fascinating to see in practice, with ghostty for example shipping these changes! I expect that the concern you have here will largely be for naught, with some exception. What are some terminal apps you think might be affected, what are test cases?

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.