How many colors are too many colors for Windows Terminal?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/case-study-how-many-colors-are-too-many-colors-for-windows-terminal/

by TiredOfLife • 4 years ago

84 54 4 years ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

Sounds like choosing the wrong environment for the application. A console terminal is for displaying console text. It needs 8, maybe 16 distinct colors. Some might argue it doesn't need colors at all.

ravi-delia• 4 years ago

Eh, a true color terminal is significantly prettier with pretty minimal cost. It feels more readable too, but I won't pretend that's the main reason. Why stare at something ugly when you really don't have to?

djbusby• 4 years ago

Too right. I wanna see my ugly code on a beautiful display.

Ansil849• 4 years ago

Some might argue it doesn't need colors at all.

Some might argue it doesn't need letters either.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 4 years ago

One wonders why we still find it so important, in 2022, to emulate 1970s hardware in the first place. However, if we're going to insist on tradition hildinng back computing interfaces then we may as well add simple things like 32 bit color.

notafraudster• 4 years ago

So, I want to share a use case. I use a Mac and iTerm. iTerm comes with a nonstandard terminal extension called `imgcat` that allows you to output images, including over SSH. My understanding is basically that it works by passing some special control characters to iTerm itself, who then render an image accordingly. Clearly this is well outside the bounds of what a normal terminal does.

I have a project that involves maintaining an image database of about 15,000 images. The images come from one of three canonical sources, or they can be gathered manually and added. Over time, more data points get added (typically every few years a new batch of a few hundred are added), and manually added images are replaced with canonical images, and canonical images upgrade in quality. I wrote a command line tool that basically allows me to monitor missing images, available upgrades, sources for each image I have, etc.

So, I run my tool, and it says, say, "there is a canonical version of image 12714 available, do you want to replace the current version?". Typically it's going to download both versions, and I'm going to proceed by imgcatting both versions and making a judgment call. This is happening on a remote server than isn't running a windowing system. I make a decision there and it's solved quickly.

Absent imgcat, the workflow is that I maintain a full copy of the database on my local machine, rsync the image directories, use a window manager to open a file explorer and preview both versions of the image, make a judgment call, and then return to the same terminal environment where I tell the same command line application which version to keep. Repeat several hundred times. This doesn't seem like a better workflow to me.

So I guess my question is how do I benefit from my terminal emulator not being able to display images, based on the design I've just told you?

svnpenn• 4 years ago

I really wish Microsoft would stop wasting time on pointless stuff like this. Windows Terminal was sorely needed, but it's now (and has been for 1-2 years) good enough for daily use, and much better than Console Host.

What Microsoft really needs to focus on is PowerShell. PowerShell can't even do basic stuff like piping right, something Bash has been able to do since the 90s:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/1908

opan• 4 years ago

I doubt the same people are working on each or that work on WT reduces work done on Powershell.

sharken• 4 years ago

Optimizing graphics output in WT requires different skills than doing piping in PowerShell.

But i agree that it's almost embarrassingly bad, that native piping has had no significant progress since 2016.

With PowerShell Core (7.x) now in a good state, one would think the piping could be improved.

Do note that it is targeted for PowerShell 7.3 tentatively, so it won't be used by default in Windows 10/11 or Windows Server.

csdvrx3• 4 years ago

I find the comments here a bit sad: some say it's "pointless stuff" and Microsoft should now stop working on WT as it's "good enough", others say "8, maybe 16 distinct colors" are all that's needed.

I just can't agree with that: I want 24 bit colors in my terminal, I want images, I want alpha blending, I want fonts with advanced attributes...

Fortunately, there are a few other people like me. We treasure Windows Terminal (and Foot on Wayland) as in 2022 it is one of the rare terminals that is still evolving and adding features.

Pull requests like this one (#11623) and the work that went behind it (exploring the LUT caching issues) are extremely encouraging: they demonstrate there is still a lot of progress possible, with many low hanging fruits!

Personally, I'm eagerly waiting for Sixel support in WT, until then I suggest https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux to derasterize sixels and show them even in terminals that don't support sixels.

If you find such things interesting, check https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1223 and the notcurses project: a great introduction is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lmMADP1lA

hamburglar2• 4 years ago

I don't know if I need 24 bit colors in my terminal, but I agree that being satisfied with such crappy performance when you go a little above "typical" is pretty lame. Software doesn't need to suck, and I appreciate people who want to make it better for better's sake.

13of40• 4 years ago

One of the reasons the "terminal" (the old console subsystem) stagnated in Windows for so long was that they assigned ownership of it to the same team that owned Explorer (the local one, not IE) and for basically every release up to Windows 8.1 they weren't able to get any budget to improve it. It wasn't until then that people started to realize that the console wasn't just a relic from the past that we would eventually shed, but something that played a serious role in software engineering and IT.

saint_angels• 4 years ago

among unique features of Foot, which one would you call the most useful?

donatj• 4 years ago

I think you’re looking for a browser. I use a terminal to get away from that noise.

csdvrx3• 4 years ago

You are free to remain stuck in old paradigms if you so prefer.

Adding features adds possibilities.

Nobody will force you to use them.

IshKebab3• 4 years ago

I 100% agree. It's crazy that terminals haven't really changed since the 80s.

That said I really hope we don't settle for Sixel. It's obsolete and inefficient. We should make a new standard. I think there's enough commonality between 2D drawing APIs (Cairo, Skia, HTML Canvas, etc) that you could easily define a terminal API for one.

csdvrx3• 4 years ago

That said I really hope we don't settle for Sixel. It's obsolete and inefficient.

That's a questionable assertion, as some people report watching movies in a terminal with mpv -vo sixel

This is possible because sixels are widely supported, which is the most important part of any format: you can then build on the existing ecosystem and showcase new uses at the same time.

We should make a new standard

Even if we assume getting everything right on the very first try, the odds of success of starting a new standard + having it supported by the various apps (ex: gnuplot, mpv...) are much lower than having terminals support the existing standard then implementing the new standard in apps / in the terminals.

Sixels exists and can be used right now.

peter_l_downs• 4 years ago

The notable update is:

Update May 9, 2022: This article was originally published without giving proper credit where it is due. We would like to thank Joe Wilm of Alacritty for establishing modern GPU terminal rendering, Christian Parpart of Contour for the continued support and advice, and Tom Szilagyi for describing the idea previously. Special thanks to Casey Muratori for suggesting this approach and Mārtiņš Možeiko for providing a reference HLSL shader. I deeply apologize to everyone mentioned. Additionally, a wording mistake was corrected in the previous paragraph.

For more background, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31287647

cyber_kinetist2• 4 years ago

BTW, the basic idea of keeping a texture atlas that contains a cache of the most used render elements isn't really that novel. It has already been done way before in the past by game engine devs who were trying to create 2D sprite renderers that automatically batch sprite textures to save draw calls (on runtime without any preprocessing step). Some examples I could find:

- https://docs.cocos.com/creator/2.4/manual/en/advanced-topics...

- https://github.com/mattdesl/gl-sprite-batch

- https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers/blob/master/cute_s...

It's a simple and relatively straightforward approach that a sufficiently bright programmer would come up in their own while looking at the design constraints though, so overall I find it a bit meaningless to find the ultimate person for the "original idea".

jchw• 4 years ago

If I’m not mistaking, the reason why it became a sticking point is because the Alacritty dev had suggested it before Windows Terminal ran into this issue, and they were opposed to it at that point. Is it petty? Honestly, I won’t try to judge that.

aliswe2• 4 years ago

He didn't claim it was anything else than straightforward, though, which is why he got frustrated that the idea was dismissed, afaik:

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1523028039705055234?t=x...

junon5• 4 years ago

The list of "thanks" people is clearly fluff, I don't see the point either. It reads as an excuse to name drop to make the whole thing seem more novel and interesting than it is. Sorry if that's harsh.

There is someone on that list that I wouldn't even want to be associated with to begin with, too. Their conduct in the OSS space is consistently hostile, arrogant and unproductive, and what they're credited for here is not something they themselves even devised or created, so not sure why their inclusion is significant here.

Really strange article.

EDIT: Someone at Microsoft involved with this article has a history of not crediting security researchers, too. Not the author, but someone on Twitter who is clearly involved.

Dunno why but this article really rubs me the wrong way.

EDIT2: Thinking more about it, why wasn't Tyriar of Ansi.js mentioned? IIRC that library was the basis for ANSI rendering in VSCode, at least at one point, and I would imagine WT was heavily inspired by it as Microsoft had a huge interest in it at least as recently as a few years ago - around the time WSL and WT started to get popular.

ANSI.js did a lot right and used hardware acceleration as well. It's just a weird, seemingly random collection of credits...

CodeArtisan• 4 years ago

OP article says

"Instead of drawing 1000 glyphs into 1000 tiny textures, we’ll just allocate one huge texture and subdivide it into a grid of 1000 glyph cells."

that's the same as John Carmack's MegaTexture. First game to use it was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007).

Him talking about the concept back in 2006:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060901185133/http://www.gamerw...

Rage originally used 1TB of texture that had to be reduced to 20GB for the release version:

https://www.pcgamer.com/remembering-rage-a-flawed-but-techni...

junon5• 4 years ago

Alacritty was far from the first hardware accelerated terminal emulator.

rasz• 4 years ago

and its a result of reaction to MS devs digging in with such gems like DHowett highly edited responses:

We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.
I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?
I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved
Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi!
we apologized
Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology

TLDR for people not in the loop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285123

- You and lhecker insulted Casey Muratori

- You insisted this was a "doctoral research" (your words) and that he was "misguided" (Leonard's words)

- When it turned out he was right, you posted a non-apology (you didn't even name the person you were apologizing to)

- A year later Leonard who claimed it was so hard now writes a blog post that "solution is trivial" and was "suggested by a community member". Once again failing to acknowledge the person who gave you this trivial solution

so MS dev has been forced to finally give credit (but still no apologies), and it only took over a year, multiple edits and little side note blog post update.

porker• 4 years ago

Off topic but why do terminal emulators default to what on my computers are illegible colours? With a black background the blue that's picked for folders doesn't have enough contrast to read.

On macOS iTerm at least comes with multiple colour schemes but the default setting is still the impossible to read one.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

The colors being set for text are for light backgrounds, I can’t tell you why but this is pretty universal.

IshKebab3• 4 years ago

I agree it's quite annoying. I always redefine the unreadable blue on Mac. It does seem like some platforms (Ubuntu?) have fixed it though based on this table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#3-bit_and_4-b...

cout• 4 years ago

I don't know if this is the reason but historically the default blue on PCs in text mode has been unreadable on a black background.

Does windows terminal use the same colors?

cma• 4 years ago

By default they mostly don't use black or white, instead using gray approximations, and throwing away monitor contrast and OLED blacks for the background.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

Windows terminal is the best thing that happened to Windows since WSL and I hoped it's going to be default soon, because I work with clients that are using W10 but still stuck with cmd.exe, and I have to bypass all their security policy to use cmder so that I have a decent working experience.

nickstinemates• 4 years ago

Alacritty is a very good windows terminal; the default one has left a lot to be desired.

frameset• 4 years ago

I believe it's the default on Windows 11. At least it was on my installation.

hnbad• 4 years ago

Yeah, it came preinstalled on my Surface laptop.

mixmastamyk2• 4 years ago

If you can bypass, why not install it?

celdon252• 4 years ago

These Terminal performance tuning devs at Microsoft really have a lot of pride. I’ll leave it at that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419

green_biri2• 4 years ago

Read the post again, they have given credit where it's due.

celdon252• 4 years ago

Understood, but they still didn’t pass up the opportunity to toot their own horn again.

ineedasername• 4 years ago

I was critical of them initially, but when faced with that sort of thing a lot of people will dig in & go into complete defensive mode.

Whether or not that was their initial reaction it takes some effort-- and they did it-- to step back, evaluate, and correct course. It's a credit to them that they were willing to accept the criticism and fix a mistake.

Giving proper credit to community contributors is very important. There are often few perks beyond personal satisfaction for taking the time & effort to help improve projects. Public acknowledgment both validates that effort further and also provides a sort of 3rd party "certification" of it that is a more powerful boost to a Vitae & professional standing than the individual noting accepted pull requests.

How many colors are too many colors for Windows Terminal?

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