change default punctuation color?

[1sixth]

eza uses Black.bold() to display punctuations, making them unreadable in some cases:

eza/src/theme/default_theme.rs

Line 80 in 724b6dd

punctuation: Black.bold(),

Tested on alacritty with default config:

Tested on kitty with default config:

Tested on xterm with default config:

Relevant information:

• eza: 0.11.0
• alacritty: 0.12.2
• kitty: 0.29.1
• xterm: 384

[cafkafk]

This isn't as much a bug as it's a question of whether or not the color should be changed, and thus discussions are perhaps better suited to gather community input.

[smackysnacks]

The fix for this is to set EXA_COLORS="xx=''", though I think eza should revert back to the default exa behavior. The eza change is broken by default for too many setups, including my own.

[cafkafk]

This does keep coming up so perhaps we should change it. Seen no one that are for keeping this.

[cafkafk]

It is clear now from community feedback that the punctuation colors need to be changed, and so I'm closing this for now. Please help contributors by providing feedback in #240.

[z0vsky]

I was about to create a new issue and found this discussion. Bumping it, and adding my findings:

Context

Tested on:

• Gnome Terminal (Ubuntu 24.04) with the built-in Solarized-dark color scheme and Solarized ANSI palette.
• iTerm2 (macOS 14.6) with the built-in Solarized-dark color setup.

Expected results

Other tools like tree, exa --tree, and lsd --tree correctly use the foreground color for tree branch lines, which makes them visible. The same goes with the '-' char from the file permission.

Legacy tree binary

legacy exa --tree

LS Deluxe

lsd --tree:

lsd --long:

Actual results

In eza --tree, the branch lines are rendered using the "black bright" ANSI color from the terminal's color scheme.
On dark colors schemes and palettes, this messes with the output as foreground blends with (or is the same as) the background color.

Note: it also happens with chmod permission characters when permission is 0 (thus represented by a '-' character).

Attempts

I tried without and with dircolors-solarized, but this had no effect on the tree's color rendering.

Temporary workaround

Set Black Bright to the same color as Foreground, but this could mess with other tools' color output rendering and readability.

Suggested workaround

eza should set the color to Foreground as it should be expected. Should someone use something else, there a free to do so with theme.yml or EXA_COLORS as suggested by @smackysnacks.