Solarized Light's brightWhite and background are set to the same color

[llinfeng]

Bug report: Simple man cp does not reveal readable documentation when issued in Windows Terminal. ConEmu does the job properly. Note, I got the same "display problem" across the local machine (Windows 10 + WSL) and a two remote Linux boxes using SSH connection.

For the following screenshot, I used ConEmu on the left and Windows Terminal on the right. Same issue with man ls as shown in the screenshot.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Hey, it looks like this is just because Solarized Light's brightWhite and background are set to the same color. That's not right.

[DHowett-MSFT]

            "background": "#FDF6E3",
            "brightWhite": "#FDF6E3",
            "name": "Solarized Light",

[llinfeng]

Aha, great catch! I changed the color for "brightWhite" to be the following. Manuals are readable now.

            "brightWhite" : "#1ea2ca",

[dander]

I assume this would apply to these as well?

            "background" : "#002B36",
            "brightBlack" : "#002B36",
            "name" : "Solarized Dark",

[llinfeng]

I am happy with the following color-settings for Solarized Light. It is hand-crafted only to make the terminal more readable. In addition to the brightWhite entry, I also updated the green and blue keys.

        {
            "background" : "#FDF6E3",
            "black" : "#073642",
            "blue" : "#004f87",
            "brightBlack" : "#002B36",
            "brightBlue" : "#839496",
            "brightCyan" : "#93A1A1",
            "brightGreen" : "#586E75",
            "brightPurple" : "#6C71C4",
            "brightRed" : "#CB4B16",
            "brightWhite" : "#1EA2CA",
            "brightYellow" : "#657B83",
            "cyan" : "#2AA198",
            "foreground" : "#073642",
            "green" : "#bac474",
            "name" : "Solarized Light",
            "purple" : "#D33682",
            "red" : "#D30102",
            "white" : "#EEE8D5",
            "yellow" : "#B58900"
        }

I use zsh as my shell, with theme: ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell". With the green entry at its default value, I see something hard to read when listing files in a directory.

[DHowett-MSFT]

But now you just don't have green. It seems like a global fix ("delete green") for a local problem ("ls uses blue on green for srwx folders"). That latter bit is configurable with dircolors/LS_COLORS.

[antoineco]

Possibly related to / caused by #293

[kojoru]

@DHowett-MSFT

Can we reopen this? Right now the experience is like that:

1. Install git, powershell core and terminal
2. Set powershell colors to solarized dark
3. Type "git add --all" in terminal

Expected result: the whole command is visible
Actual result: "--all" is the same colour as the background.

That's definitely caused by having "brightBlack" to be the same as "background", but I'm not sure which colour it should be instead, or whether changing it in the terminal is the right approach.

The problem is definitely there though.

[antoineco]

@kojoru background is supposed to be set to the same color as "bright black" in the Solarized palette (base03). The problem here is the Powershell highlighting, not the Solarized colors.

Please also note that Terminal currently displays a few colors incorrectly due to a bug. See #293 (comment)

I temporarily changed my background color to an almost identical color to get around the issue.

[kojoru]

@antoineco this is surely a least usability issue though, given both terminal and powershell are microsoft products that are set up using pretty much stock defaults?

As an aside, I'm not actually sure where the color highlighting comes from in powershell. Is that part of https:/PowerShell/PowerShell/? Can I customize that myselft?

[antoineco]

@kojoru I agree that Solarized is always a tricky color scheme to use. Whether in Bash/Zsh or PowerShell, you often have to configure terminal applications to output non-default colors due to Solarized using 16 colors instead of 8 (the standard).

You can change the highlighting of PowerShell commands using Set-PSReadlineOption.

If you also need git colors that work well with Solarized (to add to your .gitconfig file), for example for a prettier git log output, I recommend using these settings.