Skip to content

Support direct color sequences (true color, 24bit color, 16M colors) #2893

Open
Open
Support direct color sequences (true color, 24bit color, 16M colors)#2893
Labels
topic:themesIssues related to color themes or colorized output

Description

@XVilka
XVilka
opened on Jul 28, 2022

Taskwarrior would greatly benefit from allowing color themes with more than just 256 colors. Currently, most of the terminal emulators on all common platforms support this feature, and many programs like Vim use it.

All up-to-date information is available here: https://github.com/termstandard/colors

It can be tested with the following command:

printf "\x1b[${bg};2;${red};${green};${blue}m\n"

The 256-color palette is configured at start and is a 666-cube of colors,
each of them defined as a 24-bit (888 RGB) color.

This means that current support can only display 256 different colors in the
terminal while "truecolor" means that you can display 16 million different
colors at the same time.

Truecolor escape codes do not use a color palette. They just specify the
color directly.

This is a good test case:

printf "\x1b[38;2;255;100;0mTRUECOLOR\x1b[0m\n"
awk 'BEGIN{
    s="/\\/\\/\\/\\/\\"; s=s s s s s s s s;
    for (colnum = 0; colnum<77; colnum++) {
        r = 255-(colnum*255/76);
        g = (colnum*510/76);
        b = (colnum*255/76);
        if (g>255) g = 510-g;
        printf "\033[48;2;%d;%d;%dm", r,g,b;
        printf "\033[38;2;%d;%d;%dm", 255-r,255-g,255-b;
        printf "%s\033[0m", substr(s,colnum+1,1);
    }
    printf "\n";
}'

Keep in mind that it is possible to use both ';' and ':' as Control Sequence
delimiters.

According to Wikipedia[1], this behavior is only supported by xterm and konsole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_color

Truecolor Detection

Checking for COLORTERM

VTE,
Konsole and
iTerm2 all advertise
truecolor support by placing COLORTERM=truecolor in the environment of the
shell user's shell. This has been in VTE for a while, but is relatively new in
Konsole and iTerm2 and has to be enabled at compile time (most packages do not,
so you have to compile them yourself from the git source repo).

The S-Lang library has a check that $COLORTERM contains either "truecolor" or
"24bit" (case sensitive).

Terminfo has supported the 24-bit TrueColor capability since
ncurses-6.0-20180121,
under the name "RGB".
You need to use the "setaf" and "setab" commands to set the foreground and
background respectively.

Having an extra environment variable (separate from TERM) is not ideal: by
default it is not forwarded via sudo, ssh, etc, and so it may still be
unreliable even where support is available in programs. (It does however err on
the side of safety: it does not advertise support when it is not actually
supported, and the programs should fall back to using 8-bit color.)

These issues can be ameliorated by adding COLORTERM to:

  • the SendEnv list in /etc/ssh/ssh_config on ssh clients;
  • the AcceptEnv list in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on ssh servers; and
  • the env_keep list in /etc/sudoers.

Despite these problems, it's currently the best option, so checking
$COLORTERM is recommended since it will lead to a more seamless desktop
experience where only one variable needs to be set.

App developers can freely choose to check for this variable, or introduce their
own method (e.g. an option in their config file). They should use whichever
method best matches the overall design of their app.

Ideally any terminal that really supports truecolor would set this variable;
but as a work-around you might need to put a check in /etc/profile to set
COLORTERM=truecolor when $TERM matches any terminal type known to have
working truecolor.

case $TERM in
  iterm            |\
  linux-truecolor  |\
  screen-truecolor |\
  tmux-truecolor   |\
  xterm-truecolor  )    export COLORTERM=truecolor ;;
  vte*)
esac

Querying The Terminal

In an interactive program that can read terminal responses, a more reliable
method is available, that is transparent to sudo & ssh.

Simply try sending a truecolor value to the terminal, followed by a query to
ask what color it currently has. If the response indicates the same color as
was just set, then truecolor is supported.

If the response indicates an 8-bit color, or does not indicate a color, or if
no response is forthcoming within a few centiseconds, then assume that
truecolor is not supported.

$ (echo -e '\e[48:2:1:2:3m\eP$qm\e\\' ; xxd)

^[P1$r48:2:1:2:3m^[\
00000000: 1b50 3124 7234 383a 323a 313a 323a 336d  .P1$r48:2:1:2:3m

Here we set the background color to RGB(1,2,3) - an unlikely default
choice - and request the value that we just set. The response comes back that
the request was understood (1), and that the color is indeed 48:2:1:2:3.
This tells us also that the terminal supports the colon delimiter. If instead,
the terminal did not support truecolor we might see a response like

^[P1$r40m^[\
00000000: 1b50 3124 7234 306d 1b5c 0a              .P1$r40m.\.

This terminal replied that the color is 40 - it has not accepted our request
to set 48:2:1:2:3.

^[P0$r^[\
00000000: 1b50 3024 721b 5c0a                      .P0$r.\.

This terminal did not even understand the DECRQSS request - its response was
CSI+0$r. This does not indicate whether it set the color, but since it
doesn't understand how to reply to our request it is unlikely to support
truecolor either.

Truecolor Support in Output Devices

Fully Supporting

Terminal Emulators

There are a bunch of libvte-based terminals for GTK2, so they are listed in the
another section.

Multiplexers

Re-players

Partial Support

These terminal emulators parse ANSI color sequences, but approximate the true
color using a palette or limit number of true colors that can be used at the
same time. A 256-color (8-bit) palette is used unless specified.

Note about color differences

Human eyes are sensitive to the primary colors in such a way that the simple
Gaussian distance √(R²+G²+B²) gives poor results when trying to find the
"nearest" available color as perceived by most humans.

The CIEDE2000
formula provides much better perceptual matching, but it is considerably more
complex and may perform very slowly if used blindly [2].

[2] neovim/neovim#793 (comment)

Not Supporting Truecolor

Console Programs + Truecolor

Console Programs Supporting Truecolor

Console Programs Not Supporting Truecolor

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    topic:themesIssues related to color themes or colorized output

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions