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base16-concfg

Base16 color schemes for Windows Console

concfg is an utility for importing and exporting Windows Console settings written in PowerShell. This repository provides a collection of presets, driven by the Base16 specification, that can be used with concfg to import color schemes into the Windows Console.

Getting Started

Prerequisites:

• Windows OS and you're using the Windows Console
  • cmd.exe, powershell.exe, etc., that use ConsoleHost as the terminal
  • Windows Terminal doesn't benefit from this as it's newly designed and not using ConsoleHost
  • Enhanced ConsoleHost like ConEmu or Cmder doesn't benefit from this either, as they have their own color settings
• concfg installed
  • PowerShell 5.1 or later
  • concfg was created as a compainion to Scoop, you may install it via scoop install concfg

After you have installed concfg, you can import and use the presets in this repository.

concfg import https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chawyehsu/base16-concfg/master/presets/base16-snazzy.json

Please refer to the concfg documentation for more information on how to use it.

concfg help

Development

Preqrequisites: Git, Rust toolchain

Presets in this repository are generated by the tinted-builder-rust builder though only the base16 spec is supported in this repository.

1. Install build tool:

   cargo install tinted-builder-rust
   

2. Generate presets:

   tinted-builder-rust build . --sync
   

Knowledge

Color Mapping

Windows Console (ConHost.exe) only use 16 colors palette, therefore Base16, which based on 16 colors, is a very good theme solution for ConHost.

Before utilizing base16 themes, one should know that there are color mapping difference between Windows Console and other terminals (e.g. *nix terminals). The main issue is the order of ColorTable of Windows Console does not map the ANSI escape color, explained here. Because of this, we need to remapping it manually. Here is the mapping table.

*please consider citing the source if you use this table in your project.

Note that the ANSI Escape Sequences support in Windows Console is only available on Windows 10 v1511 (TH2, build 10586) or above, see this post.

Now you want to change the Red color of cmd.exe (or DarkRed of PowerShell), you need to modify ColorTable[04] instead of ColorTable[01]. This is the key, using a wrong color mapping could make your color scheme looks terrible.

To determine that if a color scheme's color mapping works correctly, you may run git diff in a dirty git directory and see the diff result. Normally there should only be red and green colors in the diff result.

About command line token colors

Since PowerShell 5, PSReadline brings command line tokens colors feature, tokens (e.g. String, Parameter) of command line get their own colors. Run Get-PSReadlineOption in PowerShell then you will see some attributes like KeywordForegroundColor, ParameterForegroundColor. These attributes are used to set the colors of command line tokens.

When using base16 color schemes in Windows Console, the command line tokens colors sometimes may not look good because of the spec limitations of Base16 (it can only use 8 colors and 8 shades of grey, and it redefined the colors palette led to a significant color mapping difference - e.g. Red of PowerShell may not be a red color anymore).

While some users might not notice the token colors, in order to address this issue, Set-PSReadlineOption may be used to remap the command line tokens colors to match the base16 theme. Below are two screenshots showing the difference after remapping command line tokens colors (see those two commands).

Example (using the base16-tomorrow-night theme):

Default token colors	Remapped token colors

I've created a PowerShell script to make it easier to do this job, you can take a look at command-line-token-color-mapping.ps1 in the scripts directory of this repository. The script has been integrated into concfg so it is also available via concfg tokencolor.

Token colors remapping is optional, you can choose to use it or not. But if you switched to another theme that is not base16 based, you probably need to disable the token colors remapping. Otherwise it may result in a weird looking console.

License

base16-concfg © Chawye Hsu. Released under the MIT license.

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