[hornetblack]

Also on Color. Don't got go all pschadelic. I've found that some programs using 256-color is unreadable with my terminal colors.

Also unix commands tend to have illegible colors in Powershell on Windows. (Ripgrep for example). Powershell defaults to a blue background.

[twic]

I am one of the handful of people to use a white background in my terminals. A significant amount of coloured output is illegible to me.

I would suggest these rules for using default coloured output:

1. Don't.

2. Really, don't. Bold is fine, though!

3. (experts only) Make sure the colour scheme works with white-on-black, black-on-white, white-on-navy (for powershell), and Monokai/Solarized/whatever the flavour of the month for insecure hipsters is.

If you use colours, by default or not, make it really easy to configure the colours, so people can make it work with their terminal's colour scheme.

[burntsushi]

Can you suggest a better default color configuration for ripgrep? We actually already have different default colors for Windows as opposed to unix.[1]

[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/acf226c39d7926425...

[hornetblack]

After some time of experimenting with this. I probably can't recommend any colors.

The issue I've found is that of the 16 build in colors. cmd defaults to trivial colors. (eg Blue is 000080 and Bright blue is 0000FF.)

Which give terrible contrast. MS seems to be working on improving things on their end. Then I'll be able to make it readable. (Eg: https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...)

[dickeytk]

Yeah if I get some time I should expand on that. There are some colors that don't work well at all for common scenarios (solarized, windows). Some of them we've blacklisted and do not use.

Also for colors it's good to try to pick a decent palette of a couple-three colors and stick with it rather than try to categorize a bunch of different bits of output on a single command.

Still, colors are awesome and make your CLI look and feel 10x better than it is, so it's worth the extra effort.

[gvalkov]

A problem with color is that people end up optimizing the aesthetics for their own terminal setup. There is a wild number of different color schemes out there and it's really hard to make something that looks good on all of them. In my experience the only safe choice is bold text (i.e. \033[1m) since it stands out in all cases.

[dickeytk]

red, yellow, green, cyan, and magenta are pretty safe. We've had complaints about others, but these are pretty reliable in my experience. dim is safe too, but doesn't work all the time. (Not working meaning just not dimmed)

[roryokane]

I would definitely not call yellow a safe color. I use a terminal with a white background, and yellow text is unreadable unless the text is also given a custom background color.