andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

The toot where I announced it.

The inspiration was that a friend with anomalous colour vision said, elsewhere on Mastodon, "I find red on black text hard to read, but authors of colourful terminal software use it a lot. It would be nice if I could change it to be white on red, which I can read easily".

They didn't want to do this by hacking on their actual terminal program (which is perhaps the most obvious approach, at least if you're a programmer), because carrying a downstream patch to a program like xterm is a pain, especially if the program is constantly receiving updates from your distro.

I had the idea that you could do the same job by means of a separate program that sits between xterm and your shell session and just rewrites colour-setting control sequences, eliminating the problem of merging two sets of changes to the same source code. So I threw one together, and there it is (in a pointless demo mode where it just changes the colours). It has the key feature that it can think about both the foreground and background colours together, and rewrite them as a pair, so that it could map "red on black" into "white on red" as specified.

But at the moment, it's a starting point for experimentation: it doesn't have a built-in set of colour translations intended for any given type of unusual colour vision, and it also doesn't have a convenient configuration language. Anyone wanting to try it out at the moment will have to edit the C source code and recompile (which I know the friend in question is capable of). If it turns out to be useful in the long term then maybe I can change that, but I'd want to get some input from potential users first, because I don't even know what kind of configuration language would be convenient.