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boinkor-net / chars

cha(rs) is a commandline tool to display information about unicode characters
https://github.com/boinkor-net/chars
MIT License
183 stars 13 forks source link

Suggestion: Make output colorful #25

Open Gowee opened 4 years ago

Gowee commented 4 years ago

Hello.

chars works pretty well and really helps a lot. However, its output looks a little boring and different parts of output take a while to distinguish.

So it would be great if the output is colorful. How do you think?

antifuchs commented 4 years ago

I'm somewhat ambivalent on it - in my experience, color can help navigate dense information, and help clarify things that otherwise would take a lot of text to explain. On the other hand, they can make things harder for people who have trouble telling certain colors apart, especially if color is the only way that information is represented (I'm not colorblind myself, but some of my friends are - I want the tool to remain accessible to them). And then there's people who object to colorful output in general.

In terminal utilities, it's difficult to get colors truly "right", especially because people can pick arbitrary background colors and e.g., a scheme that works well on a dark terminal background can look completely unreadable on a light terminal.

So, I think it would make sense to include output colorization as an option, if we use it to highlight information that's also represented in text, and we don't go overboard - stick to the ANSI color scheme (16 colors) and avoid the red/green and blue/yellow tone ambiguity.