Wash out text in the terminal

[mitchejj]

I use a 'Solarized Dark' theme for my terminal window, so sure some of this is a problem of my making.

As you can see in the attached image some of the text, the gray text, can appears washed out, for the lack of a better term, based on the color of a users terminal window. This is the first program I've ever had issues with, so it could very well be a color choice that is rarely use. However, a few of the other stock OS X terminal themes appear to have similar issues.

[sintaxi]

Thanks for providing the screenshot. We'll look for a better way to display this.

[monfresh]

I'm running into this issue as well, except in my case it's even worse. Some text (like email) is completely invisible to me when using the Solarized Dark theme. Here is a screenshot:

[kennethormandy]

…yeah that’s bad, we’ll definitely fix this. Thanks very much for the screenshot.

[kennethormandy]

@kennethormandy Note to self: Change Surge to use Chalk, switch grey to dim and test how this works with Solarized

[ahmedelgabri]

@mitchejj @monfresh That's an issue with Solarized theme itself you can follow it here to try one of the ideas there to fix it.

[rwxrob]

I use solarized for all our gnome-terminals at the school as well and have long been plagued with Chalk's incompatibility with Solarized (and the author's complete refusal to make Chalk compatible with Solarized). I've read way more on that theme war that I would have cared to (including the thread posted by @ahmedelgabri). There is no easy way out of this I'm afraid. At least you can see the base03 in this example. In the gnome-terminal, which has not been tweaked like the Mac terminal version has, none of the black (base03) text is readable.

I love surge so much I am teaching it to all our web and HTML5 game developers (along with Harp) in place of GitHub pages but to do so I have had to tweak the terminal themes on dozens of computers tell students to change their terminal colors just for the web development class. I love Solarized way to much to abandon it (as @paulirish stops just short of suggesting in that thread) — especially now that is part of the standard Ubuntu gnome-terminal. I have never enjoyed coding for hours as much as after having installed Solarized and surge just makes me want to code more.

Thanks again for a great project. I hope you realize how much you have helped educators everywhere teach true web development to everyone old enough to type on a command line. I can't praise it enough. I also love that it encourages lateral growth instead of vertical. By allowing sub-domains, having collaborators per sub-domain, and loading the whole thing every time, developers are encouraged to look for flat architectures and get into the 'services' mindset from the very beginning.

UPDATE: While installing the 15.04 Ubuntu release and customizing the background and terminal we noticed that Solarized Dark is not officially part of the preconfigured selections. This level of official adoption makes if very hard for me to want to tweak since it is baked into gnome-terminal and the OS already. I strongly suggest testing surge from a 15.04 Ubuntu Desktop when finalizing the terminal color selections.

[kennethormandy]

So I have looked into this a little more. We aren’t actually using Chalk, so it’s definitely not a Chalk-specific issue. I’m inclined to side with the people in the Solarized issue and say the problem is that grey has been mismatched to being the same colour as the background.

It’s unfortunate this has been made a default in Ubuntu. That said, colour in the terminal should be treated as progressive enhancement: everyone seeing the text is more important than a majority seeing it in two colours. I’ve added a PR that should help with this.

@robmuh Would you mind helping me test this? I don’t have a Ubuntu VM setup right now. Could you run this:

git clone https://github.com/sintaxi/surge
cd surge
git fetch origin
git checkout -b ko-chalk origin/ko-chalk

npm i
./lib/cli.js --help

…that should set up my branch and display the updated help text. Would you mind posting a screenshot of that for me please? Thanks!

[rwxrob]

@kennethormandy Will test this tomorrow and update this comment. (Teaching all day today.) As much as I love Solarized I also agree this 'bug' in the Solarized Palette itself is annoying and unfortunate. But it is what it is. It is worth noting this does not affect the Mac solarized terminals as much probably because someone made base03 solid black.

In the meantime we are shifting to another high contrast profile to do the first surge.sh push lesson and then once setup we don't really need to see the invisible text.

[monfresh]

After realizing this was a bug in Solarized, I ended up switching to Chris Kempson's themes, which work great with Surge. I'm currently a fan of the Atelier Lakeside theme: http://chriskempson.github.io/base16/#atelierlakeside

[rwxrob]

Thanks @monfresh I did try them but the colors though similar to Solarized are not the shades and tones I have come to really love. I suspect eventually the gnome-terminal version will be corrected much like the Mac version, which to me is perfect.