Default colors are illegible on stock MacOS Terminal

[plajjan]

This is a message rendered with the default colors of the MacOS Terminal.app with the Basic color scheme when in light mode (it automatically flips to dark mode when computer is in dark mode at evening - dark mode looks great). . Parts of the text is close to illegible.

I'm no color scheme expert so I can't immediately tell what is going wrong but given that the vast majority of apps render just fine on stock Terminal, I think Diagnose could perhaps do a better job at selecting a color that renders nicely on light terminal color schemes.

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Thanks

Got to take the opportunity: Thanks very much for this package, with it I've been able to greatly improve the visual appearance of error message from the Acton programming language compiler, e.g.

Not only is it more visually appealing but I think the error message format itself naturally encourages us as compiler engineers to write better error messages, like the way we fill in position and a text message to go along with that pointer is great. We used to produce similar messages with two pointer (definition of and call of) but with a single text field and Diagnose.Error is so much easier to work with and produces clearer result. Thanks!

[Mesabloo]

Hi.

Yes, the default color scheme uses a White-ish color for the code (see

diagnose/src/Error/Diagnose/Style.hs

Line 115 in d3ffbb7

CodeStyle -> color White

and the documentation of this function). But as far as I remember, you can also make your own color style if the default one does not suit you.
I, however, agree that the default style should not make any assumption on the background color of the terminal. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to dynamically set the color (depending on whether the background color is dark or light), but a simple fix would be to replace color White with mempty in the snippet linked (so that the code is outputted in the foreground color of the terminal).