[IPython-dev] Colours in IPython 0.11 rc1 PPA package

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 14 July 2011 14:56, Julian Taylor <jtaylor.debian at googlemail.com> wrote:

> yes I modified the default color. The main reason is that in terminals
> with light backgrounds certain elements, like source code in tracebacks,
> are almost unreadable (bright yellow,grey on white) whereas with LightBG
> you can still read everything quite well even a dark background terminal.
> So I chose the in my opinion the lesser of two evils. Also the debian
> default gnome-terminal has a light background (and its what I use too ;) ).
>
> Its hard to please everyone with the default. Ideally there should be
> some detection of the terminal background color at runtime.
>

OK, I didn't know Debian used a light background by default. So it's going
to need to be changed between the Debian package and the Ubuntu package. It
can easily be changed in the config file if the user has their terminal set
up differently, but I think it is important that we match the default on
each platform.

At least in my terminal, unfortunately I can't read everything properly with
the LightBG colours. In particular, tracebacks and the code shown by obj??
are both too dark to see easily.

I'll have a look at whether it's possible to detect colors. The best thing I
can find at a glance is the dircolors command. If you've got a debian
machine, can you send me the output of "dircolors --print-database", and
I'll compare it to the same on my own system.

Thanks,
Thomas
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