Introduce a color palette to terminal output?

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

right now everything's white text outside of debug logs (blue) and error messages (red). We're set up to be able to take advantage of a whole gamut of colors to use in a color scheme that I think would lend itself to a more professional look.

Would we want to employ some of the Remote Guardian Gradient shown in the logo?

Charmbracelet is an opensource software team writing in Go that does a great job writing with great aesthetics in the terminal

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

for context, this is the debug output on my windows terminal (all blue)

This is the help text (all white)

and this is the version text (all white)

to play devil's advocate, micronaut is a phenomenal software team and their cli output is all white, it seems

[BarredAvenger]

right now everything's white text outside of debug logs (blue) and error messages (red). We're set up to be able to take advantage of a whole gamut of colors to use in a color scheme that I think would lend itself to a more professional look.

Would we want to employ some of the Remote Guardian Gradient shown in the logo?

Charmbracelet is an opensource software team writing in Go that does a great job writing with great aesthetics in the terminal

I'm good with using the colors from the logo but since they are very similar, it would be good to use other colors. Making sure warnings are different enough from alerts or info messages.

[BarredAvenger]

I did some more research on this.

• Make sure the colors are color blind distinguishable.
• Add a "--no-color" option. Or how you would want to do that.
• Keep it simple, color Info, warnings, errors, debug, and success messages. Did I miss one?

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

Keep it simple, color Info, warnings, errors, debug, and success messages. Did I miss one?

I think that's all of them - maybe our other discussion on Verbose output will add an option to this.

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

I think separating verbosity with color is adequate for now, and then something to help the readability of large output, ie the help text.

I've taken a stab at extracting a color palette from the Remote Guardian logo

black

#000000
#202020

red

#c045aa
#d5a7cd

green

#81bb45
#bad0a3

yellow

#b88047
#dbc3ac

blue

#447eb8
#a0b9d1

magenta

#68329a
#a083bb

cyan

#44bb80
#a9d6bf

white

#dfdfdf
#ffffff

xresources config

! special
*.foreground:   #dfdfdf
*.background:   #000000
*.cursorColor:  #dfdfdf

! black
*.color0:       #000000
*.color8:       #202020

! red
*.color1:       #c045aa
*.color9:       #d5a7cd

! green
*.color2:       #81bb45
*.color10:      #bad0a3

! yellow
*.color3:       #b88047
*.color11:      #dbc3ac

! blue
*.color4:       #447eb8
*.color12:      #a0b9d1

! magenta
*.color5:       #68329a
*.color13:      #a083bb

! cyan
*.color6:       #44bb80
*.color14:      #a9d6bf

! white
*.color7:       #dfdfdf
*.color15:      #ffffff

[BarredAvenger]

The red and green shades are indistinguishable for people with deuteranopia or protanopia. Said a more contrasting shade of green would help. I'll look into the accuracy of this tomorrow.

[BarredAvenger]

All the other colors are potentially good.

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

@BarredAvenger, I'm waiting on #16 to finish compiling before I merge it with main. I didn't add anything in the README to demonstrate these changes, but it may be worth the time to figure how we can employ vhs in our workflow to provide a gif in the readme as a demonstration. vhs is an open source tool that already has a github workflow, I want to say - so It may be a small lift to get that working if it's something you find value in.

[BarredAvenger]

I think adding a GIF demo in the README using vhs sounds like a great idea if it’s a small lift. If there's already a GitHub workflow for it, I’d say let’s test it and see how useful it is.

Let me know if there's anything specific you need from me to move forward.

[Jonathan-Zollinger]

ya, I think it'd be a small lift - in fact, I can do this part pro bono before we hit pause.