Color brightness in CMD prompt, different between Win11 and Server 2016

[tsimmons]

This is probably not a bug, but I don't know how to tweak the settings to help visibility when using clink in the CMD shell on Windows Server 2016, in particular with the brightness of the colors. In Windows 11, the argument colors are very bright and easy to see:

However, under Windows Server 2016 CMD prompt, the argument colors are dim and frankly hard to discern:

The clink_settings are exactly the same between these two. Any advice on how to improve visibility on Windows Server in the CMD shell?

[chrisant996]

Windows Server 2016 does not have ANSI escape code support, and its console can only use 16 colors (but you can adjust what those 16 colors are).

On Windows versions before Windows 10, Clink has to emulate ANSI escape code support, and there's no way to emulate 24-bit color. Only 4-bit color is available. Clink chooses the closest 4-bit color to whichever 24-bit color is requested. But naturally 4-bit color is nowhere near as rich as 24-bit color.

You can configure the colors in Clink to use different colors that look better to you, but there's no way to match the colors available on Windows 10 and higher.

[tsimmons]

Ah, that makes perfect sense. Thanks!

[chrisant996]

For info on configuring colors, refer to Colors in the Getting Started section of the documentation.