Interactive scripts (back on topic for once) [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 12:12 am, Paul Moore wrote:

> What really bugs me is colour settings that default to dark blues on
> a black background.

Amen to that!

Between the very low contrast, and the stereopsis whereby blues appear to
recede into the distance (and bright red pull forward, appearing to float on
top of the terminal), dark blue text on the background is nearly unreadable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis


[...]
> Add the fact that
> I work on shared admin accounts, where setting non-default preferences
> is considered an antisocial act (even when they are "better" ;-)) and
> I spend my life squinting at screens, or typing "unalias ls" to remove
> the --color setting. Luckily (for everyone who has to listen to me
> rant), this is "just" annoyingly badly configured systems, and not
> baked in program defaults.

At my previous job, the solution to that was to ban changing the default
settings, but allow admins to create their own personalised defaults.

Fred would log in to the shared account, and run 

    source fred

to get his personalised settings. When George logged in to the shared account,
he'd see the defaults, not Fred's settings, and could run

    source george

to get his own settings.

(Obviously Fred and George would have to create the "fred" and "george" config
files first.)

I don't know if Windows shells have something like bash's `source` command,
but if it does, this would be one solution.


-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.