Re: Something wrong with prompt themes

[Adam Spiers <adam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bart Schaefer (schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> Those characters are just stipple-patterns in a VGA console font; the
> faded/shaded themes actually look best on the raw console of an x86-PC
> unix system such as Linux (i.e. without X11).

For an example screenshot of how they're supposed to look:

  http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/~adam/computing/zsh/

> It ought to be possible to use actual colors for the fade from one color
> to another, but to do so for an arbitrary pair of colors would require
> a ridiculously big lookup table to find the correct ANSI codes.  Maybe
> there's some algorithmic way involving an AA that keys the ANSI codes
> on their RGB values ...

Yep, this had already occurred to me, and made me realise for the
first time ever (duh) that in fact the ANSI colour order does directly
follow RGB:

  code | colour  | RGB
 ------+---------+-----
    0  | black   | 000
    1  | red     | 100
    2  | green   | 010
    3  | yellow  | 110
    4  | blue    | 001
    5  | magenta | 101
    6  | cyan    | 011
    7  | white   | 111

Sorry, that was probably almost insultingly obvious to anyone with a
brain (that is, everyone here except me :-)

But then that doesn't usually help determine intermediate colours for
a gradient, because there isn't enough granularity when you're working
at 3-bit colour depth.  So I left it to the user in the end.