[asterisk-users] ANSI terminal colors

[Philipp Kempgen]

Jay R. Ashworth schrieb:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 03:23:57PM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>> On Thursday 14 August 2008 13:59:37 Philipp Kempgen wrote:
>> > Jared Smith schrieb:
>> > > On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 20:35 +0200, Philipp Kempgen wrote:
>> > >> Whenever something spits out lines with a different background
>> > >> color (of a varying runlength!) my eyes start to hurt.
>> > >
>> > > You can turn of the ANSI color support completely by adding
>> > > "nocolor=yes" to the [options] section of asterisk.conf and then
>> > > restarting Asterisk.
>> >
>> > Sure. But I want colored output on my default background color.
>> >
>> > :-)
>> >
>> > ls with dircolors works perfectly. So I was curious if there
>> > is a reason for Asterisk to behave differently (forcing the
>> > background color to black).
>> 
>> Because nobody else ever asked, perhaps?
> 
> No, I would suspect that it's because there's probably a subconscious
> perception that colorcoded text "works better" on black than white, and
> indeed, it does: you often have to fiddle the colors chosen to get it
> to be readable against black: the default red has too little luminance
> to stand out from black, for instance.
> 
> It's the same problem as backlit keyboards with silver coatings, or the
> display on a Palm IIIe: in certain lighting conditions, you simply can't
> read it at all.

True. But lines of varying length with a black background in a
white terminal window don't make it any better. Just causes the
ragged margins to stand out.
If someone sets their default background color to something other
than black it's their choice and they have to live with it.
It's a consious decision and trying to outsmart the user is not
good.

Actually I would like my terminal app to be able to translate
ANSI colors to whatever I want them to be, e.g. map
black bg -> white bg
white fg -> black fg
blue  fg -> red   fg
But that's a different problem which needs a global approach
rather than different approaches by single applications.

Grüße,
Philipp Kempgen
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