Green highlight is too bright for comments

[YaLTeR]

The inserted word is basically invisible:

On regular code it's fine but could still be less bright:

Themes I tried: default, OneHalfDark. Terminal: alacritty. Alacritty theme: base16-ocean.

[dandavison]

Hi @YaLTeR, the choice of theme determines the foreground color of the text for syntax highlighting, but it does not determine the background color. To select the background color, delta provides options --minus-color, --minus-emph-color, --plus-color, --plus-emph-color allowing the 4 background colors to be specified as hex codes, so with a 24-bit color-capable terminal emulator there is a lot of choice! To quickly try out colors, the --show-background-colors option can be useful.

It sounds like you want to experiment with the value of --plus-emph-color.

I don't have a terminal emulator with base16-ocean theme installed, but the dark mode defaults used by delta were chosen for a black terminal background. Is the answer here to choose your own custom colors for base16-ocean?

[YaLTeR]

FWIW with completely black background (alacritty defaults) it's the same issue:

I can play with --plus-emph-color, just trying to figure out if it is perhaps an issue with the default value?

[dandavison]

Oh I'm sorry, yes you're absolutely right. The default --plus-emph-color in commented text on a black / dark terminal background is unreadable. Have you found an alternative color you like?

Honestly, I have struggled with finding good defaults for delta on a dark background. I think it looks great on a light background with the defaults (e.g. white, or I sometimes use the iTerm2 "material" theme which is a sort of very light pearl gray background). But I'd always felt that we can find better defaults for dark.

[YaLTeR]

#005000 seems to work better. I can't quite strike a good balance between enough highlight and comment color legibility.

On a related note, --show-background-colors drops leading zeros from individual color bytes making it really hard to tell what the actual values are. E.g. for the default --plus-emph-color it shows #e7ce and you can only guess that it's actually #0e7c0e.

[dandavison]

Great thanks, I think I'll go with #006000 for now.

--show-background-colors drops leading zeros from individual color bytes making it really hard to tell what the actual values are.

Yes, agreed!

current (#0e7c0e)

#006000