On Tuesday, 27 June 2017 at 17:28:42 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I've seen complaints from people who have black-on-white terminals (or vice versa) finding some programs producing unreadable text because the program set the foreground color to black without also setting the background. Of course, it's rare that programs would explicitly set black or white foreground, but I happen to use a light green background for my terminals and so a green foreground, for example, would be pretty unreadable for me.
Unless the program is a full-screen application, setting the background color is the wrong solution. It will just make the terminal look like a zebra, alternating contrast every time the program's output starts and ends. I.e.: awful, which is why nobody does this.
The point is that you can't predict what the default background color is set to, so unless you set both, there will always be some case where it looks bad or is outright unreadable.
This is why the screenshots I generated include both dark-on-light and light-on-dark terminals. It is not impossible to choose a color set that will look okay on both.
