Starlight

Starlight is an ansi color theme focused on usability.

It was made after I made the discovery[^1] that I have a color perception deficiency: I have trouble differentiating between hues of blue (a greater one than the average person, making it impossible for me to read typical default blue text on black backgrounds). I also have a mild deficiency along the same lines for red, but not nearly as bad. I set out to make a high contrast theme that would work for me (a non-normative survey helped discover that some others have no issues with this content, while a few others do still struggle, but due to not struggling as much as I do, they simply live with it). [^1]: I now have an actual diagnosis: tritanomaly. It’s sufficiently rare that health professionals where I live do not screen for it when checking for colorblindness.

This repository is me sharing it.

You can find the exact rgb data in colors/colors.sh. Other files inside of colors/*.sh are generators for various applications I use. The goal is for me to only need to modify colors/colors.sh and the explanation/implementation section whenever I make adjustments.

Screenshots

Users

You can find a list of things using starlight in the USERS file.

Goals

All base colors (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white) should be easily uniquely identifiable.
Bright variants should be identifiable side by side, but do not need to be uniquely identifiable.
Text in any color (except black) should be legible on the black, even when not bold.

See the CHANGELOG to see implementation details.

As Template

A lot of the tooling present is usable as a template for other ansi color schemes. To use it this way, modify colors.sh and set your own colors, re-using all of the other scripts as-is. Don’t forget to add a screenshot to data/ and modify the README!