Can you change what colours are used for the black and white values?

[Kirtai]

Hi
I was wondering if it was possible to change what colours are used for the on-screen black and white display values.
e.g. have Maiko map Medley's black and white to e.g. cream and very dark grey on-screen.

[nbriggs]

As it stands today, there's no option to change the "black" and "white" colors - Under X11, it unconditionally uses the XLib BlackPixelOfScreen() and WhitePixelOfScreen().

I know that at one point someone tried changing it to take a -fg/-bg for the colors, but it did not work properly (probably didn't find all the dependencies on black/white), so we dropped that code mod.

It's something we could go back and look at again, and it might be easier to get working with SDL.

If the reason behind the request, though, is to make the cursor stand out more -- use the X11 version (ldex) and -cursorColor xxxx (my ~/.Xresources has ldex*cursorColor: red and that works very nicely)

[nbriggs]

I've hacked at it for a bit, it's not clean, but this is a proof-of-concept, and only for the X11 display version. It'll take X11 named color specs for foreground and background. It uses the same colors for the main X11 window and the scroll bar etc. - every color that would have been white is now the background color, likewise all black is now foreground color. A call to (VIDEOCOLOR T) will invert ONLY the colors used in the main display, not the scrollbars. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

% cd medley && ./run-medley  -m 32 -g 1200x700 -sc 1200x700 -fg lightGoldenrod  -bg dimgrey loadups/full.sysout

[Kirtai]

I've hacked at it for a bit, it's not clean, but this is a proof-of-concept, and only for the X11 display version. It'll take X11 named color specs for foreground and background. It uses the same colors for the main X11 window and the scroll bar etc. - every color that would have been white is now the background color, likewise all black is now foreground color. A call to (VIDEOCOLOR T) will invert ONLY the colors used in the main display, not the scrollbars. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for, thanks :)

[nbriggs]

@Kirtai - If you're comfortable building the maiko code from source you could try building from the nhb-display-colors-choice branch of Interlisp/maiko -- I have both the X11 and SDL versions working reasonably, I think. Both will take a -fg/-bg (or -foreground/-background) with a color name (from the X11 color set) or a 6 hex digit color as #rrbbgg

[Kirtai]

Thank you, this is really nice and much appreciated :)

Only one thing is missing and that is support in the medley helper script.

[nbriggs]

@Kirtai Frank is going to add them to the medley helper script as known options, but in the meantime you can throw in -- followed by arbitrary options that get passed on to lde, so, for example, (from the medley directory) ./medley --sysout loadups/full.sysout -- -fg white -bg darkgray would work.

[Kirtai]

That worked perfectly, thank you :)

[masinter]

@Kirtai Just curious,..... what colors do you use and why?

[Kirtai]

Orignally I just wanted to make the contrast less harsh and reduce the blue a bit to make it easier on my eyes, especially at night.

Right now I have

-bg "#fff5f0" -fg "#202000"

but I need to experiment more with it to see what's comfortable in the long term. It already feels a lot better than the stark black and white.

(a terminal like amber/green plus very dark grey looks nice but I don't know how useable it'll be)

[pamoroso]

This feature is gaining appreciation and interest. Yesterday I shared on Mastodon a screenshot of Medley with different colors and so far it got 35 likes and 14 reshares. A comment by requiem 🏴:

this is beautiful.

and by Tomáš:

this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

[nbriggs]

Implementation addressed by PR Interlisp/maiko#511