Re: [tlug] Solarized Colour Scheme

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2018-09-15 12:16 +0200 (Sat), Jens John wrote:

>   * base16-solarflare from this [1] collection....

I'd come across the base16[2] platform in my travels but didn't quite
understand how it worked, beyond that it seemed to be arbitrary
replacements of the standard 16 (00 through 15) terminal colours. I'm
feeling at the moment that such arbitrary replacement, such as what
solarized does, doesn't work since most programs out there assume a
somewhat-standard palette for those colours.

But looking further at the base16-shell[1] scripts, which are setting
additional colours 16-21 (I think the 17 in the README is a typo),
this base16 thing (which I venture to say is not explained very well
for the complete novice) appears to be an attempt to keep a set of
basic 16 colours that's compatible to at least some degree with what
naive programs are expecting and yet gain a few of the advantages of
what solarized and other schemes are attempting to do.

It seems, too, that terminal colour schemes for the basic 16 values
don't matter much on a 256-colour terminal when using an editor that
supports that and is propertly configured; things just go bad there
when you have to fall back to 16 colours and you have a sufficiently
mismatching combination there, which is precisely what I'm seeing in
xterm versus 256-colour urxvt.

I wonder if there's a document out there that describes, for folks not
already familiar with this, the various tradeoffs with playing around
with the 16-color scheme. For example, it seems that "colours" 08-15
are in 16-colour terminals the bold versions of colors 00-07 (i.e.,
set by sending SGR[3] commands 1;30 (bold;black) for colour 08, which
will produce different output (in particular, bold rather than
non-bold) from SGR command 38 5 8 for extended colour 08. Looking at
it now, I suspect vim is giving me the output I like in a 256-colour
terminal simply using extended colours rather than standard 0-7 and
bold 0-7 for "8-15" .

(Jens, even if you have have nothing further to offer on this, thanks
for the tip on base16-shell; that helped enormously.)

[1]: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell
[2]: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#SGR

cjs
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Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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