Why does bat not have ansi as default theme?

[chtenb]

It's not clear from the readme what the default theme is, but it doesn't look great on all terminals/terminal themes. The README does mention the great benefits of the ansi theme however:

• Enjoy maximum compatibility. Some terminal utilities do not support more than 3-bit colors.
• Adapt to terminal theme changes. Even for already printed output.
• Visually harmonize better with other terminal software.

Maximum compatibility, works great with any setup by default. Why not have the ansi theme as default? That would save a lot of people research time into configuring bat. Most people are just looking for something easy that looks great immediately.

[Enselic]

The problem with having ansi as the default theme is that it is much uglier than the default 24-bit theme. And like you say, most users just want something that looks great immediately. The ansi theme does not look great.

Also see #1104 (comment)

[chtenb]

The ansi theme simply uses the base 16 color palette provided by the terminal emulator (i.e. the terminal theme), which is by no means restricted to 256 colors definition. It does look good on all my VSCode terminal themes. My point is: if a user has a certain terminal theme (probably selected carefully), why ignore that completely by default?

But thanks for the link. It seems this discussion has been done already.

[Enselic]

Most users don't have a carefully selected terminal theme. Compare our current default with ansi on a vanilla system and you'll see that our current default looks much better.

[fregante]

our current default looks much better.

I fail to see how displaying white text on white background is better. macOS has always had a white terminal by default so by default bat is broken there. It literally “does not work.” I don’t understand how you can continue to suggest that this is a good default.

[Enselic]

I agree we have a problem. The mere fact that we repeatedly get complaints is a good indication of that. Personally, I think it would make sense to do the following:

1. If on macOS, and
2. if no explicit theme is set, and
3. If not defaults read -globalDomain AppleInterfaceStyle is Dark (see Support for different themes based on Terminal color scheme #1746)

Then we should default to a theme that looks good on a light background.

It is not a perfect solution, but:

1. It makes us look good on the vast majority of macOS systems
2. The increased startup time can be avoided by explicitly setting a theme

[Enselic]

I created a PR to try the above approach. See #1746 (comment).