[arp242]

How would that work with applications that hard-code the background to black (or some other colour, like tmux's green statusline)? If you change the colours to work on a light background then those break.

You have to choose what you want to break. Once you start pulling on one thread lots of stuff start to unravel. It's really not a simple matter of "choosing a better theme".

I've spent a long time looking at this, and my conclusion is that there is no safe default that will work for everyone, other than bold/reverse and 256/true colours and setting both the foreground and background.

[sunshowers]

If you hardcode the background to a fixed color, the 4-bit palette for foreground colors is generally to be avoided -- instead, use the 8-bit (256 color) or bigger palettes.

[arp242]

I don't control these applications.

[sunshowers]

If I understand correctly, you're in the situation where you've chosen your 4-bit colors so that they render properly on an application which (incorrectly) uses an 8-bit background color but a 4-bit foreground color, and also that the colors don't render well on the default background that's part of the same 4-bit palette.

I think you'd be a great candidate for jj's ability to customize colors.

[arp242]

I don't choose anything; I just use the xterm defaults. Some colours inherently conflict. Blue on white is fine. Yellow on black is fine. Yellow on white is not. White on white is even worse. There are many combinations that don't really work brilliantly. Some applications set background colours, some don't. pamix, ngrok, and npm are examples of applications that hard-code background colours. Configuring the terminal to use text colours that work well with both the default white and hard-coded black (for some applications) is hard.

That I need to spend a bunch of time setting all of this up (among other things) is exactly how this thread started.

[wredcoll]

What situation do you have where jj is rendering colored text on top of a background you don't control? I'm perplexed.