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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

So unless you mean to exclusively sell coffee to users who don't have a white terminal background, you may want to consider your color scheme. I was missing the white text.

(I know this is considered an atrocity by some, but I happen to not really care enough about my terminal color to change the default)

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The atrocity was committed by whoever set that default, we can work out a plea deal as long as you rat them out.

Mac OS X’s Terminal.app used to be black-on-white by default, wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still the case.

Xterm is black on white by default.

Is there an environment variable defined for specifying if you want light or dark colours? If so, then it would help with local programs, and also with remote programs (such as this one) if you add a SendEnv command into the SSH configuration file to specify that SSH should use this environment variable.

A little non-portable but there is an xterm escape sequence[1] that gets the user's background color: \e]11;?\a

You might also be able to use the reverse-video[2] escape sequence to get something that works depending on the user's color scheme.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/7767891

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_video

The whole system wide light/dark stuff came about too late to help our terminal sessions.

we meant to have this fixed before launch, but ran into some snags with charm's `wish` and adaptive colors.

shipped an improved light mode today!

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