Colors

Yil · 11-25-2010, 06:16 PM

Something happened between RC2 and RC3 with ANSI colors. I'm not sure when, but I tried build 1488 and it was OK, but 1502/3 and I think 1499 were all different. Check out the red and magenta of the bright intensity sets for instance...

bigstar · 11-25-2010, 07:43 PM

Hello,

I did make a slight change to the colors please see the following post

https://oss.azurewebsites.net/forum/bugtracker.php?do=viewbug&bugtracker_bugid=409

I'd appreciate your feedback.

EDIT:

I was thinking maybe I could do two color schemes based on the background color, if the background is closer to black then use one set or if closer to white to another.

Yil · 11-25-2010, 10:58 PM

Hey, that new wiki page showing the different terminals/shells idea of the colors is really very useful! Unfortunately the total lack of conformity is annoying. I sort of thought it was standardized as well, based on the old page.

I'll be honest, when you added the high intensity set I simply cloned my ANSI color themes, and changed everything to the high intensity colors and it looked roughly the same as before. I don't use anything from the normal in my newer themes, though I kept the older themes so v3.6 Flash users can use them.

In my personal opinion the PuTTY colors suck. They are ALL muted. The high intensity set should really be something like what the charts shows for Windows XP bright. The normal colors for XP or xterms are probably my choices for normals. I'm not sure if I don't like the slightly punchier normal xterm over normal XP but they don't offer as much of a difference over bright, though it's possible they work really well against white backgrounds or something. There's probably a really good argument that just copying the Windows XP command prompt colors for a windows app isn't a bad thing, and they look pretty good already.

After v4 comes out I'll probably go and update the ioFTPD color themes to utilize background colors, italics, and underline. The server supports all that now, but none of the themes make use of it because back when I did it very few people had the betas.

Yil · 11-25-2010, 11:16 PM

One other thing that did catch my eye. Previously black, I think, was defined twice as something like 0,0,0 in Flash under normal and bright. When I changed from normal to bright back when you first played with colors I used them interchangeably and never noticed a difference. However, I see that all the systems that support bright actually defined bright black as a grey and that's probably worth emulating since you can always use normal black for black.

Allowing the user to choose between two color sets based upon weather they are using light or dark backgrounds isn't a terrible idea, but it might be hard to do. For instance I think I remember that bright yellow on white backgrounds was too hard to read for me so I couldn't use it, but choosing another yellow is probably tricky.

I think what you might want to do is something more like the following. Offer an option to replace the normal colors with the bright ones. As I understand that bug report you pointed at, the guy had the same problem I did. Namely the colors all became muted in the newer versions because his ANSI site was probably only sending normal intensity colors. I solved that problem by just adding a bright theme to all my servers, but he's stuck. He'd probably like an option to replace all the normal colors (but black!) with the high intensity color so he can get the brighter ones again like the older Flash v3.6 had. He liked the old version fine

bigstar · 11-26-2010, 02:25 AM

The only reason I switched from the Windows XP command prompt color set to PuTTY is that I thought the PuTTY color set looked better. You're right Putty uses a shade of gray for bright black. I didn't even notice this until you said something.

Personally I think it should be done way and any site that doesn't have the colors right needs to update them, having the client cater to the server for something so trivial is a bit much.

I have no problem using one of the color schemes used by one of the popular clients defined on wikipedia.com but I really don't want to spend too much time on this when I have other issues I need to deal with to get v4.0 stable released. The colors can always be tweaked down the road, we just need to agree on what looks best.

Yil · 11-26-2010, 02:31 AM

I'd stick with the RC2 set, update the bright black to grey, and add a button to force all colors to bright (except black) just to make v4 act the same as 3.6 did for non-updated or older sites. I think that should cover all the bases.

bigstar · 11-26-2010, 02:02 PM

I will revert back to the RC2 set.

My only concern with having an option for switching modes is that it would need to be on a per-site basis which isn't really practical.

Yil · 11-26-2010, 11:08 PM

I suppose if you use the "mapping" feature to turn normal into bright you could do that by scanning the line and tweaking the color code before adding it to the status window... That way it wouldn't matter if 2 sites had different settings because everything after that would be the same and you could then have per-site settings.

I was happy with RC2 though, and the bugreport guy wasn't going to be happy unless you can map colors so might as well stay with RC2 colors, except perhaps tweak bright black to gray. I'll have to update my themes, but that isn't a big deal and it's better to gain a color.