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Ask HN: Contrast-Aware Terminal Emulator

1 pointsby EscapeFromNYalmost 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve long been annoyed by unreadable color choices in command-line apps. Dark-blue-on-black. Bright-yellow-on-white. I often find myself squinting or leaning into the screen just to read some text -- or worse, subconsciously avoiding the terminal altogether.<p>Even `ls` on an fresh Fedora install has bad color defaults. In the dark theme, normal dirs are dark-blue-on-black. In the light theme, sticky-bit dirs are black-on-dark-green. Neither is easy to read.<p>Tweaking the terminal&#x27;s color theme isn&#x27;t a solution, because different apps use colors in different combinations, and colors that make one app look better will make another app look worse. Some &quot;modern&quot; terminal apps use 24-bit colors which aren&#x27;t theme-able at all.<p>I think a better place to solve this is at the terminal emulator layer. I&#x27;d love to use a terminal that checks the contrast between the foreground&#x2F;background colors for every character, and adjusts colors on the fly if the contrast is too low.<p>A couple kind commenters here pointed me to iTerm2 and Windows Terminal, but neither are available on Linux. Are there any Linux terminals that have this feature?

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