GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 749470
Solarized theme causing grey color to be invisible
Last modified: 2015-05-17 10:19:59 UTC
Many applications are using 9th color (gray) of the palette for writing logs and error stacks etc. This is a big and a common problem with solarized theme in terminal. https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/802 I've found many issues across multiple projects with this theme. The problem is that when u change this 9th color many users are using VIM colors solarized and it will cause a vim background to be this defined 9th color which is a bug in the vim colors solarized and should not block this bug. I think that invisible text is much worse then setting wrong theme in VIM. Solution to get this working with VIM is pretty hard. I just edited my VIM to not have a background so for me it works. https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized
So, how is this actually a bug in gnome-terminal?
gnome-terminal is providing this theme
We didn't make up this theme. It's colors are exactly defined at http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized .
I know that. This theme is well known. The thing is that invisible text is a bug. And it is caused because of wrongly set color in the theme. Something that should be fixed in the theme. And gnome-terminal is providing this theme with a bug
After choosing Solarized theme and executing echo -e '\e[90m\u2588\e[0m' and then using xmag to query the printed color, it says to me (0, 2b2b, 3636). According to "The Values" section of the Solarized homepage, base03 should have the hex value #002b36, and occupy the 0-based slot #8 (that is, 1-based slot #9) in the palette. So, again, sorry, I don't get you: where do we exactly implement Solarized incorrectly?
You didn't. You are just bringing bugged theme to your users. Which usually doesn't know that the theme is bugged. The reason that that color is the same as the background is only that VIM theme wouldn't work correctly. In terminal it shouldn't be there. It is causing invisible text.
Just to clarify: on the Colors tab of Profile Preferences, the are two relevant combo-boxes: one at "Text and Background Color", and one at "Palette". You should select Solarized at both places to get the Solarized experience. Some versions of Gnome-terminal lacked the first one of these, this bug has since been fixed.
So, are you asking us to remove this color theme, because you don't like it??? Solarized is not a theme that should be used with the default colors of apps. Solarized was designed to have apps with special matching configurations. If you don't like this theme, you're absolutely free not to use it.
I love it. I am asking you to fix the invisible text bug. I've set both the terminal theme and palette. You can see with your own eyes that the colors are the same which is causing bugs in many CLI software which is using gray color to represent something.
We're not in the position to diverge from the theme's specification. If we did, it wouldn't be Solarized anymore. You're free to customize Solarize for yourself, go ahead and enjoy! Solarized is popular enough to be shipped by us. Your favorite modification to Solarized isn't. Please accept this answer.
Just to clarify: If you see hard to read colors then you either haven't configured your app (vim whatever) to use a color scheme designed for Solarized (which you ought to do), or that particular Solarized color scheme is designed poorly for that particular app (in which case you should follow up with whoever created that color config for that app).
ok .. It's your choice so I leave you. Just add this here https://github.com/altercation/solarized/issues/220. Many users/programmers are using many of these software tools that are listed across that issue.
In that bug, apparently people complain that the output of tools that were not configured to be solarized-friendly don't look good on solarized. Of course they don't, it was never a goal and it couldn't be. Apart from modifying solarized according to your own personal taste, I have two more recommendations to you. One is to define two profile, one with standard, and one with solarized colors. That way, with a right-click in your terminal, you can quickly change between two schemes. Use solarized whenever you like it, and use a traditional one whenever the app isn't prepared for this and looks bad. In fact, the palette colors can be changed run-time with escape sequences (OCS 4), so you can even write a wrapper in front of some your tools to toggle the colors back-n-forth. The other is that you could speak up for adding true color support into certain apps, e.g. vim. Palette support is IMO a legacy crap that should've been obsoleted a long time ago. Gnome-terminal does support true color. There's a patch for vim too. In that case, an app has full control over all the colors it uses, regardless of the defined palette. That way it'd be the sole responsibility of apps to choose proper, readable colors.