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I've moaned about this with other CLI tools as well. I wish trend of using RGB values in ANSI escape codes would die because as ugly as the 16*3 colour fields¹ are, they are at least customisable so people can use palettes that suite their terminal and eyesight.

You don't get any such opportunity if the developers hard code the colour values in (and it's worse with a tool like this because you can't even set an environmental variable to change the tools behaviour)

¹ sixteen colours plus bright and dark variants



Can you link me to a way to use colours that change with the terminal colour preset? I haven't come across anything like that or maybe didn't pay attention. It would be really helpful

You said you can't even set an env variable to change them so I assume that there is an even better way?


Wikipedia has a good section on the different methods of describing colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#3/4_bit

I've got some Go code that you can reuse if you want to the escape codes in Go: https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/utils/ansi/codes....

Just bare in mind that any numbers you see in documentation are sent as ASCII values rather than integers. eg `ESC[31m` (red text) should be sent to the terminal as

    []byte{  // http://www.asciitable.com/
        27,  // ESC character code
        91,  // '['
        51,  // '3'
        49,  // '1'
        109, // 'm'
    }
Though, as you know, most languages will have some syntactic sugar to translate characters to their ASCII values, eg

    'm' == 109
    Asc("m") == 109
    ...etc...
so at least you don't have to write all those values by hand.


Thanks for the explanation and the snippets ^^


On Linux, in X, you can use xresources. Otherwise there's termcap


totally forgot about xresources! thanks for the reminder




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