Colour scheme using ANSI basic colours to match terminal theme

[lachholden]

Hello!

It would be great to get a mode/setting to get all output to use only the basic ANSI colour escapes i.e. the first section shown here: https://talyian.github.io/ansicolors/

I saw the option to use a light theme exists, which can help with some terminal configurations, but using combinations of the 8 basic colours + bold/dim/etc modifiers means the output will match the colour theme of the whole terminal on almost every terminal emulator.

This helps with both ✨ aesthetics ✨ (I like to have a pretty terminal 🎨) and also readability, as with my present terminal theme, not all of the colours used in either the built-in dark or light theme are 100% readable.

I'd almost say there's an argument to be made that sticking to the base 16 colours should be the default and more advanced light and dark themes should be explicitly enabled using the config, but I would also be completely happy keeping things as-is with a config option to use the basic colours.

Thank you :)

[jotaen]

Thanks for bringing this up. I’d probably want to stick with the current defaults, but I think it wouldn’t harm to add another colour theme such as basic or simple.

[vladdeSV]

Just want to chime in that if klog was using the default ANSI colors, there would not be any need for dark or light color schemes – the same colors would always be used and work perfectly, and it would look much better ✨ if the colors matched my terminal palette.

[vladdeSV]

I printed one of my work days, and then manually recreated it with the usual ANSI colors… and I might have to take back that an explicit light or dark mode is not required. On light themes, the date and time spans become super hard to read no matter which light theme I used 🙁.

My own custom theme:

iTerm2's default "High Contrast" theme:

iTerm2's default "Solarized" theme:

[jotaen]

But wouldn’t you adjust the ANSI colours anyway? I.e., if you switch to a light terminal theme, wouldn’t you tune the colours so that they are easy to read?

By the way, I too noticed that on my terminal (Terminal.app, the MacOS default one), the preconfigured ANSI colours of most built-in themes are not well readable. I think this was also a reason back then for me to provide custom 256 bit colours for the output. I still think there is value in offering a basic 8-bit colour theme via the config.ini (#325).

Another, rather fancy idea for the longer run could be to provide an ability to completely customise the output colouring of klog. Might be overkill, but could be fun.

[vladdeSV]

[…] wouldn’t you tune the colours so that they are easy to read?

In the best of worlds that would be the case, but unfortunately that rarely works 😕 – most light themes' colors I've seen are hard to read on the default background (like iTerm2's default "High Contrast" color palette)

One example I can think of is Vim, which changes which colors it defaults to when you specify the theme of the terminal; :set bg=light or :set bg=dark

[vladdeSV]

I'm gonna backtrack (again 🙈), and say that a light / dark mode probably is not needed – it really should be up to the color palette to be readable. (I ended up changing the colors of my own custom theme).

Solarized above has readable time spans (eg. 8:00 - 12:00), and if black and white colors are not used, I believe it should be readable no matter what.

My suggestion would be to use normal foreground color for the dates (eg. 2024-08-01), and it should all be fine 😊

[jotaen]

I’ve created #325.

[jotaen]

The new basic colour scheme has been merged and will be available as of the next release.