termenv

Advanced ANSI style & color support for your terminal applications

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3Mentions

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REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Advanced ANSI style & color support for your terminal applications

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by day3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-03-23 14:31:09 UTC to 2021-04-04 07:47:12 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Mar 23	2021-03-23 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-24 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Mar 24	2021-03-24 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-25 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 25	2021-03-25 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-26 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 26	2021-03-26 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-27 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 27	2021-03-27 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-28 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 28	2021-03-28 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-29 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 29	2021-03-29 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-30 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 30	2021-03-30 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-31 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 31	2021-03-31 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 1	2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-02 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2	2021-04-02 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-03 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 3	2021-04-03 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-04 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 4	2021-04-04 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-05 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

3 sources

de6u99er·Apr 4, 2021

The windows one just returns default black, which is correct in most cases since very few change it to something else. https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/d1b90ad4a4915162648dd...

In Show HN: Lip Gloss is a CSS-like layout library for the terminal for Go

jwalton·Apr 4, 2021

This is the function they are using to detect the background color: https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/d1b90ad4a4915162648dd... (There’s a different version of it for Windows.)

In Show HN: Lip Gloss is a CSS-like layout library for the terminal for Go

chrismorgan·Mar 23, 2021

Look, you and I may have sane ANSI 16 colours, but it’ll be a very significant fraction of people that don’t (and almost no one will customise the next 240 colours). Remember things like that there’s a distressingly high chance that blue is almost invisible against black, and even bright blue’s contrast is commonly much too low—to say nothing of the limited palette range. But what this program is doing is using termenv’s HasDarkBackground function to decide whether the terminal is light or dark, and is then specifying RGB colours. It’ll try to guess whether to use 16 colours, 256 colours or 24-bit colour and do some kind of mapping down if necessary (which I bet this app makes a total hash of, probably not having chosen the colours carefully). But the way it figures out the terminal’s background colour… ugh. Some terminals will support it

Read the rest

, but for many it’ll fail and just assume black. Looks like on unix you could set an environment variable COLORFGBG to override this, https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/6bb55115565c27f4cc681..., but if you’re on Windows, tough luck, apparently you’re not allowed to have a light terminal (which you can get in Command Prompt by running `color f0`): https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/537e36cb0472a69a3c828.... The simple fact of the matter is that there are no particularly good solutions for handling colour in terminals if you want the colours to cohere and naturally map to real-world colour understanding, which is what something like this would prefer to be able to do. Things are just barely OK if you just want colours with no inherent semantics. So… yeah, might be nice if they used the 16 colours, but I can readily understand them not doing so, and if they did do so, although it’d make it better for some, it’d make it worse for others. Where does the balance lie? I dunno.

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