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Re: Color Schemes


Aha!

Clicking on the icons and spinning the number wheels is NOT the same
thing at all! :-(

Right.


The real issue I'm having as the naive user is the colors dialog GUI
human interface.

...and for the record, I hate that UI. :-) It isn't very well designed IMO.


[snip]
As I understand it, the OS thinks it is still using white-on-black,
but cygwin is mapping those to white-on-black in the drawing routines.
 Right?

Um, yeah, something like that. The tty knows what color codes it is using ('0;30' - '0;37' and '1;30' - '1;37'), which have "standard" colors assigned to them, e.g. '0;30' is "black", but you are correct that if you change the mapping, the underlying programs (ls, man, etc) don't know that you have done so.


Whereas before, I was changing the very definition of "black" to be
255,255,255 and white to be 0,0,0 -- and that just confused the heck
out of the OS.  Right?

I think what you were doing before was telling the OS to use '1;37' as the default background color, which confused the heck out of applications that expected it to be '0;30'.


This was not at all clear from the layout and the controls.

What's more, there's a real goofy disconnect here between all the
OTHER colors that can be affected.

Right, it is not a very intuitive system. (Time to plug Console again; it has the same features but is less confusing. http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/)


For example:
After re-setting the background to 0,0,0 and foreground to 255,255,255
and then choosing the white icon for background and black icon for
foreground, 'man man' was much better.

I found that the grey color of args and such-like, however, was too
difficult to read.

So I wanted to alter the 128,128,128 color to a darker greyscale value.

To do that, I have to click on the color icon, which changes whatever
radio button is selected at the top, then muck with the numbers to
alter the underlying values of "grey" to a different "grey", then
click back on another color icon to get what I want for the radio
button.

In other words, editing the palette has been inextricably linked with
altering foreground/background, and it's quite a confusing
non-intuitive jumble of two different activities:

Right. To edit the mapping ("palette"), you have to pick a color... which changes the default code used for background (or whatever radio is selected), edit the color, and then re-select the previously-selected color. It's a bad design.


#1) Altering the colors selected for 4 visual elements, out of dozens
of visual elements that are actually in use in the underlying OS.

#2) Altering the very definition of individual colors like "black" to
be something other than 0,0,0

This is not all just a rant -- I'd really like to suggest a better
alternative.
[snip]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ :-)
Otherwise, you're complaining about a Windows component and need to bitch to Microsoft (and good luck with that).


It would also be Really Nifty (tm) if some common utils such as ls and
less output could be included in the sample output, so that one could
play with the colors without endlessly opening/closing the dialogs.

Feel free to suggest an 'apply' button for Console (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=43764&atid=437332). Then you would just 'ls' (or whatever) at a regular command prompt, and then 'Apply' would update the window for instant results.


I'm not sure for how many years I've been doing this wrong in Windows
shell setup, but it never ever occurred to me that I was changing the
definition of "black" to 255,255,255 and the definition of "white" to
0,0,0 -- rather than just choosing black for my foreground and white
for my background...

Apparently I never noticed as 'Doze doesn't have anything I use in
shell that color-codes anything anyway.

Right; 'doze is not big on color in console programs.


And now I realize that cygwin probably has zero control over this
dialog, and it's entirely Microsoft's fault.  That explains a whole
lot.

Yup. But it sounds like you might like Console a lot better. :-)


Or, before Gary tries to convert me again, rxvt will let you do the same things, although it's more traumatic a switch than Console (note it isn't installed by default; you need to install it via setup.exe).

I appreciate everybody's input on this, and apologize that it has
turned out to be completely OT, as far as I can tell.

Well, you can always http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#TITTTL :-), although I still think it's at least somewhat relevant.


--
Matthew
We apologize for the inconvenience.


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