Yeah. I've tried the Kitty last year and when my colors showed different I found this Issue already closed and with some strong words/opinions from him. Hard to like it.
He's not wrong, though. He's following the spec, and users are asking him to violate it to be compatible with programs which also violate it. If everyone just followed the spec, however, colors would work beautifully for everyone all the time without anyone having to worry about weird edge cases in specific programs.
If a program you run in Kitty displays incorrect colors because it's hijacked bolding instead of implementing proper color support, you should absolutely go and make the issue known to the authors of said program as they are the ones who fucked up by violating the spec in the first place.
The whole point of standards is to make the relevant technologies more accessible. Developers too often break spec without regard for accessibility, all in the name of cool new features. This is bad, and it makes sense to discourage it by simply enforcing the spec.
The standard says "bold or increased intensity". I see brighter colors on dark background (what everybody does) more in line with it than darker colors on dark background (what Kitty does).
> He's following the spec, and users are asking him to violate it to be compatible with programs which also violate it.
Users are asking for a configuration option to behave the way every other terminal works, and the way everyone writing software that runs in terminals that relies on any behavior relies on terminals behaving.
It is not the way that every other terminal, or indeed terminal emulator, works; nor is it relied upon by "everyone".
For starters: Softwares that use terminfo, and anything built on top of it such as ncurses, only use this for one specific terminal type, linux-16color. No other terminal type in terminfo changes colour this way.
The idea that boldface and blink change colours has been on its way out since the 1990s. XTerm has had the ability since 1997; and while its XTerm personality does not, its UXTerm personality defaults to boldface meaning boldface. Of course AIXterm, at the start of the 1990s, had SGRs 90 to 97 and 100 to 107, and did 16 colours that way, not with boldface. The Windows Terminal issue shows some of how far this notion has extended in the more than a quarter of a century since.
It isn't a VGA world any more, and people aren't assuming VGA semantics any more. Ironically, before VGA, in the world of MDA et al., as seen from the SCO Console, people didn't assume these semantics back then, either. There has been a sea change. boldface means boldface. And blink actually means blink (or nothing, depending from what one's views on blinking as a GUI mechanism are).
Yes absolutely. People sometimes assume that you have to implement feature XY, just to lament 1 year later that another software is not that bloated. I like people with a strong opinion and if i don't like it i use something else.
