-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 9.1k
Description
Description of the new feature/enhancement
In #14844 there is an interesting comment from a Terminal team member:
We really wanted to revisit the fact that for most users (who haven't set the OS theme), when they launch the Terminal, they get a window that's mostly black, with a white titlebar. This contrast seemed a little silly to us.
Well, that is a little silly, but there's another way to address the silliness: what if the window contents were some color other than black?
I personally prefer black text on a light background for my terminals. However, Windows Terminal does not realistically support this. There is a "color schemes" feature and several included light themes, but they do not work with out-of-the-box Windows Services for Linux. By "do not work" I mean that the ubuntu defaults result in extremely light text on a white background, or dark text on a dark background. For example here's the One Half Light theme running "ls":
Look how difficult this is to read if there are one-letter directories:
I obtained all three of Windows Terminal, WSL, and One Half Light from Microsoft, but despite all being in some sense Microsoft products they are configured in a way that using the three at the same time does not work.
Moreover, selections are still white-background with One Half Light, so it's very hard to tell which areas are selected:
Proposed technical implementation details (optional)
I'm not sure I know exactly why this is happening and I don't know what the solution would be. Maybe there is a Terminal color scheme somewhere on the Internet that fixes it fully, maybe I can configure something within Bash to change the colors WSL outputs. But given MS Terminal does ship the One Half Light theme out of the box, it would be reasonable to expect it to work out of the box.
Moreover, I note Apple's Terminal.app does not have this problem without anything needing to be configured— it has a (default) light-on-black scheme and it works fine even when SSHing into remote servers where nothing has been preconfigured. I think the way Apple swung this was they silently invert the color of all foreground or background terminal colors. This probably makes multicolor ANSI art look wrong, but since that basically never comes up it is okay.
My "expected behavior" is that Terminal should ship with at least one color scheme with a light background that can be used without making things unreadable and without me needing to edit any JSON, whatever is necessary to make that happen.


