Portage/emerge is using a lot of yellow these days, for use flags and also for the numbers in "Emerging (5 of 10)". One of the two most popular desktop environments, KDE, uses a white background by default for it's terminal program, Konsole. xterm's background is also white by default. I recommend that the konsole package be patched in some way to use a black background by default, or portage should stop using yellow. I think the ideal approach is for portage/emerge to use colours that will work on a white background and a black background, the two extremes. That way it doesn't matter what colour scheme any of the terminal programs use by default.
So remap them as needed? :) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125120 ***
Jakub, I think remapping is great, but I think setting the defaults to better colours is a good idea as well.
Well so what exactly is "better colors"?
there is no such thing as "most backgrounds" would help to provide two sets of colors; one for light backgrounds and one for dark backgrounds so people can quickly pick a set, but other than that the current defaults are just fine
Actually I have idea that I think would improve the defaults and be a simple change (it also wouldn't require any documentation change). Just change the yellow from super-ultra-yellow to a different shade of yellow. The yellow that eix uses for keyword masked packages is readable even on white. And I have not seen any problem with any other colours I don't think, just yellow.
If someone comes up with a patch that implements a better default color scheme post it here, but it has to be something more specific "the color that xyz uses for foo"
I think "Just change the yellow from super-ultra-yellow to a different shade of yellow" is pretty specific. Why should I spend any time figuring out how to patch this when one of the authors of the software could easily change this in 2 seconds?
Well, I won't waste time figuring what other "shade of yellow" would make people happy.
there is a related article in: http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20060918-newsletter.xml#doc_chap3 Purple looks great ;-)
From portage article: "When using a white background for a terminal emulator and portage displays some text in yellow (e.g. new useflags with the "%") it can be very hard to read." This is pretty idiotic when you think about it. Read the original bug report. KDE's konsole uses a white background by default and so does xterm apparently. And portage uses pure yellow for new useflags meaning they are almost unreadable. So here we have a weekly report admitting the fact that it can be very hard to read (in fact very hard to read on my out-of-the-box gentoo systems). We also see in Bug #125120, the reporter saying "The default color scheme provided by portage with the new USE= flag output is rather unreadable on a white background." http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-427948.html In this forum post, a user says: "My opinion is to get rid of that very unreadable yellow output. I'll probably file a bug for it. Who also thinks that yellow is just bad? Another user suggests purple, as someone suggested here in comment #9. "That shows up on white and black backgrounds. :) Plus it's the official color of Gentoo and it goes great with my theme. Looks great too. I think all yellow references should be changed to purple." Another user says: "I agree!!! Yellow is very hard to read for me too. Please, change the default color to any other color which is well readable on white and black terminals." It's not that hard. But whatever, portage is only on one of my machines now anyways so I don't really care that much. "Well, I won't waste time figuring what other "shade of yellow" would make people happy." Nice cop-out.
Well, if someone gives us an exact ansi color code we can revisit this, doesn't has to be an actual patch.
(In reply to comment #11) > Well, if someone gives us an exact ansi color code we can revisit this, doesn't > has to be an actual patch. > I am currently using 0xAA00AA , but is possible that David prefers other one :-/
(In reply to comment #12) > (In reply to comment #11) > > Well, if someone gives us an exact ansi color code we can revisit this, > > doesn't has to be an actual patch. > > I am currently using 0xAA00AA , but is possible that David prefers other one > :-/ I think he was more interested in the escape sequence used to produce the correct color in a console (documented in `man 4 console_codes`)...
Pacho, anything other than pure yellow is fine. :-)
