miniblog.

Why do so few CLI tools use colour inside their error messages? For example, rustc uses colour well in the error display, but there's no special styling of the content in backticks. By contrast, markdown website almost always style backtick text differently from prose. E.g. `field` is not specially styled here.

@krinkle@mastodon.technology I don't know of anyone using difftastic by default, including me! (I use it >50% of the time though.) I toyed with background colours but I didn't find anything that I really liked. Contrast is hard, and depends on the user's theme. Background colours look bad with syntax highlighting (e.g. red background with blue comment text). It also looked silly due to ignoring whitespace between symbols. It's an interesting space and I'm still experimenting :)

I'm feeling reasonably happy with the light and dark styles of difftastic now: there's a reasonable amount of contrast on both sides. I'm now using ANSI bright colours for the dark theme and it works pretty well. I had to give up on cyan as it's too pale on light backgrounds.