nosh VS no_color

> The default configurations of most terminals includes illegible color combinations

This hasn’t been my experience - while I’m not familiar with a wide breadth of terminal emulators, all the ones I’ve used have a default black background with the ANSI colors being very bright, making them clearly visible. I would again say that if a terminal emulator has some of the standard ASCII colors to not be visible on their default background.

And of course, once you start changing the background color then you can’t make any assumptions about which of the user’s colors will be visible - which is why, as you say, the background color should not be changed without a very good reason, and if the bg is set, it should be very easy to switch it to either a “dark mode” or “light mode” to make colors visible.

But some assumptions must be made in order to make any use of color, and “the 6 standard ANSI colors (red, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, blue) are visible on the user’s background” seems like it has to be the safest assumption.

I am in support of terminal programs respecting a universal configuration to disable color: https://no-color.org/

I was for a while faking a 16-color terminal without support for 256 colors just to avoid this configuration hell. I also tried https://no-color.org/ because I’d rather have no colors than bad colors.

These days I just gave up and manually configure most apps to use ANSI colors (e.g. fzf etc have command switches for that), and let Vim and Emacs be the only non-ANSI apps which are instead set to match the colorscheme I use in the rest of the terminal. (Although stuff like vim-dim let’s you go one step further if you want.)

I'm totally the other way around, I rely on colorized output heavily.

But! There's supposed to be a solution to this, set $NO_COLOR to some value. https://no-color.org

Totally reasonable to file a bug report against tools which don't check and respect that env variable.

It'd be good if it recognised https://no-color.org/ and just didn't do anything. Or maybe replaced with

Maybe it does, I didn't check.

This sounds like a really good pattern, and something that deserves to become a modern standard (like https://no-color.org/).

I feel like this should be made opt in somehow. If you are a noninteractive process and stdin is a tty then you probably shouldn't be swallowing input. I frequently blind-type the next command while a long running command is active, because well behaved noninteractive programs don't swallow input from stdin.