vtty & X terminal color scourge
Once upon a time, I could count on minimal coloring on vttys and X terminals. This
was unaffected by my inclusion of
setterm -foreground white -bold -background blue -blank 59 -store
in .bashrc, which after some years needed to be changed to
tty=$(tty); [ "$tty" != "${tty#/dev/tty[0-9]}" ] && setterm --background blue
--foreground white --bold on --store
NC in DOS around 1985 or so gave me an affection for blue backgrounds instead of
black that has stuck for full screen modes, and for plain text apps whether in
text mode framebuffer or GUI window.
Mostly what I remember from my early Linux days was dead/broken symlinks would be
red and black or red and yellow or white. Otherwise it would be black on yellow or
white in X terminals, and "gray" on black normally on vttys, with an occasional
smattering of white in place of gray or inversion of normal colors when
highlighting was appropriate. I was content.
Now it seems nearly everything has adopted varied foreground colors that are
inadequately contrasty. I noticed https://no-color.org/ via another thread here
today, but have found NO_COLOR=1 exported to have little impact. I tried removing
everything from .bashrc affecting color, but that impacted nothing I tested with.
What bothers me more than anything is that dead symlinks haven't been red, or
anything else to distinguish them, in a long time. With Bookworm on a short path
to release, I'd like to find out if it's possible to get some semblance of old
limited colors behavior back, along with dead symlinks standing out. Apparently
the places to start are bash and dash. Where do these shells get their default
colors globally defined? /etc/dash* doesn't seem to exist. /etc/bash.bashrc seems
only to contain whether colors are enabled or not. Colors don't seem to be under
the purview of console-setup either. Is there any strategy available to limit
coloring of plain text I/O globally that I've missed? Can framebuffers or GUI X
terminals be forced into a 4 color mode that apps cannot ignore? Surely due to
accessibility considerations there must be some way to ensure adequate contrast.
--
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata
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