Blue seems brighter
Hmm, my Turbo Pascal(*) editor's background will get brighter, don't know if that is comfortable.
(*) well, the Free Pascal imitation
Microsoft's making over the Windows Console, the tool that throws up a command line interface and which has hung around in Windows long after DOS was sent to the attic and told not to show itself in polite company. The company's revealed that in Windows 10 build 16257 the Console will get new … colours. Yup, that's all. …
Ha! It's nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to bolster the productivity of Windows programmers (or cut the coffee expenses of their employers), pushing them to stay up and work further on into the night - blue light _allegedly_ prevents you from sleeping after all... Now, where that tin foil hat...
blue is like 15% luminosity or something like that, so "brighter blue" would be easier to read, especially if you're old...
I'm glad MS is brightening up the default colors. Now, will this be done with gnome/mate shells, too? default colors on THEM are like the old CMD defaults. I'm always forced to "unalias ls" and "unalias grep" and things like that to get rid of the colorized trext, because I CANNOT READ THAT DAMNED COLORIZED TEXT half the time (dark blue or dark purple on black - what dim-bulb thought THAT was a good idea?).
It's *IRRITATING*.
So a big well-deserved KUDOS to Microsoft <--- spelling their name properly when they do something right
Yes, it is.
Personally however, I only use the classic black & light white command prompt. It never had colours when we had black and white monitors, so why change now? ;)
Or maybe that's just very 1980's of me. Personally, i'd prefer that the engineering time was put into something i'd notice such as putting the start menu into server 2012 as an alternative to the mobile phone interface.
If I'm getting a chocolate monitor then I don't want any of this crappy, modern LCD stuff. I want a 30" CRT made of solid chocolate. I want to get my money's worth.
Now to find a fridge large enough to fit it in.
Oh and I'd better book some more gym sessions, so I can lift it.
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Mine was set to nearly black and light amber, or vice versa, I forget, like the nice Amber CRTs that superseded Green CRTs. I stopped using it last November 2016. Quite happy with customisation of Mate on Linux Mint.
The only thing ever that was a problem was some sorts of CGA cards stuck on Slug Death colors (black, cyan, magenta, white). There was a nicer alternate (black, red, yellow, green). It was horrid going to shiny CGA from a matte ACT Sirius 1 (800 x 400?) mono (Victor 9000). The Sirius 1 arrived marginally before the IBM PC, with its Text only or CGA. Hercules mono (720x350) was later and still inferior to ACT Sirius 1/Victor 9000 (as was entire IBM PC), but better than CGA Mono 640 x 200.
Why don't they simply fix their broken & totally flat GUI to one suitable for a laptop or desktop? Which is ALSO better for 10" tablet with keyboard than their stupid GUI for a 4" phone.
Maybe, but the point is valid - did you take a look at the image in the article? I can confirm the new "dark"-blue-on-black test is readable, but the old one definitely has a "something's there but I have no idea if it's even letters" quality to it, uniquely among the rest of the colours...
It might be explained poorly, but it meshes with my experience running Emacs in Linux text terminals. The dark blue portions of syntax highlighting are extremely hard to read on an LCD that's adjusted for proper photo and video viewing. I actually think the problem may be the opposite of what they say -- LCDs tend to compress the dark end of the contrast range, losing detail in the shadows. CRTs, with their truer blacks, had a wider range.
if you are running Emacs with Syntax highlighting you are
1) Not getting the full unadulterated experience of Emacs. Like good chocolate, Emacs should be used in as a raw a state as possible, just the way Stallman intended.
2) You identify yourself as a newbie (e.g. someone with less experience than say 25 years) with Emacs.
You might as well say you're a VB fan running code in a MS IDE and have done with it.
I suspect they're mostly focusing on the contrast between foreground colors and a black background, since that's the most common situation. The slightly lighter blues make a big difference in that scenario.
Maybe Microsoft could do something really useful and make a web browser smart enough to figure out that white-on-light grey text should be rendered as white on black.
There are still lots of bits and piece of Windows that could do with a makeover. I still find it odd that a company with the vast resources at Microsoft’s disposal produces an OS that has bits and pieces that look like they’re from decades ago. You’d expect absolute GUI consistency across Windows 10’s own components. Surely it can’t be THAT hard to achieve.
"produces an OS that has bits and pieces that look like they’re from decades ago."
Its not the age thats the problem , after all unix/linux still has plenty of ancient shells and tools which work fine - its the fact that even back in the day the DOS CLI was an underpowered POS that was only really useful for listing directories and starting programs. Doing anything more complicated was either a PITA or impossible. It would have been relatively easy for MS to port one of the *nix shells over to Windows and intergrate it nicely but I suspect Not Invented Here syndrome got the better of them so instead they waited 20 years then came up with powershell which can be rather arcane at the best of times.
MS to port one of the *nix shells over to Windows and intergrate it nicely but I suspect Not Invented Here syndrome got the better of them
Or, more likely, the fact that most of the decent shells are licenced un GPL and, as such, a cancer that must be eradicated^W embraced and extinguished.
If they could make ADUC put the cursor in the Name field of the Find dialog it would save me hours.
It's been like that since forever, the gripe about it has been passed down from generation to generation, nothing will ever change.
So the only chance of consistency is if we accept consistently inconsistent, and frequently rubbish.
"If they could make ADUC put the cursor in the Name field of the Find dialog it would save me hours"
You know what pisses me of with that thing?
You right click / find at the top , start typing the name of a person or a PC , or group
press search , didnt find anything
Then you realise that for some fucking reason you have to tell the thing which of those you are going to be seaching for (you dont on my command line vbscript replacment i can tell you!)
So you drop the dropdown , select 'computer' and you're eager to get going buts its popped up a little dialog saying "This will clear your current search results" Well no fucking shit! when has any other application that has a search function (which is most) thought it neccassary to say that??? so you waste more time clicking ok on that , and start typing again .
Then you realise that despite informing the app that you are indeed ready to start a new search , and that you are aware this will wipe previous results THE CURSOR ISNT IN THE FUCKING SEARCH BOX!!!
That added to the fact that no wildcards are allowed , so you have to know the exact prefix for the group / pc that some sysadmin pulled out of his arse years ago makes me conclude :
"Could do better"
In fact given a day or 2 I could probably do better
In fact i bet people already have....
I think that's all part of the game. Over the years that OS has had increased and decreased functionality. The new format makes it easier to decrease functionality and then, at some point, charge to get that functionality back.
Why I remember when...(old guy, me ;), continues rants as he walks off)
There are still lots of bits and piece of Windows that could do with a makeover. I still find it odd that a company with the vast resources at Microsoft’s disposal produces an OS that has bits and pieces that look like they’re from decades ago. You’d expect absolute GUI consistency across Windows 10’s own
components. Surely it can’t be THAT hard to achieve.
True, if they could just jettison all Windows 8 GUI code, return Aero, remove all "Apps", get rid of "Settings," that would be a start.
"There are programs which are bottlenecked by the speed of stdout."
Minimise the window and the program will run faster.
I have no idea why that is the case.
(Kudos to whichever Powershell programmer added a set of default command aliases so that not only does dir do what you expect, but so does lh)
"Console windows are used by lots of things other than the command prompt." yup - you'll find things getting launched as "cmd.exe /s [something]". Yes, it's probably just laziness, but in many cases, it's effective and simple and simple means less likely to have bugs.
"PowerShell needs to load the .NET runtime"
Which is virtually instant. On my Windows 10 laptop, Powershell takes under half a second to load to a prompt from clicking on the icon.
"cmd.exe is much, much faster"
Not once loaded. Powershell is way way faster. And Powershell can also do true parallel branching. So for instance it can go query info from 100 PCs at once, rather than sequentially...
Personally I'm of the opinion that they should just go all-in on bash support. cmd.exe can stay around for legacy support if needed, but is kinda optional. PowerShell, on the other hand, should be given the Old Yeller treatment, as soon as possible. It's kind of the worst of all possible worlds.
"'m of the opinion that they should just go all-in on bash "
Why would they do that when they have Powershell? It has numerous advantage over Bash and pretty much no disadvantages.
Not to mention being way way easier to understand and use? For instance:
DIR -Recurse | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner | Select -Unique (Powershell)
vs
find . -printf "%u\n" | awk '!match(str," "$1){str=str" "$1;print $1 }' (Bash)
And here are a few of the other advantages:
1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings.
2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.
3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.
4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.
5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.
6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.
7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.
8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.
9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.
10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.
11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?
12) Strongly typed stripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.
13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.
14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.
15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.
retire it and replace it with Powershell
Please - no. Powershell is an abomination that combines all the worst bits of Windows and *nix command-lines into one crufty package-o'crap.
I know some of the admins swear by it but that's because none of them have been exposed to a *proper* CLI environment.
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" Powershell is an abomination that combines all the worst bits of Windows and *nix command-lines into one crufty package-o'crap."
Ask yourself then why say VMWare changed from a Bash type command environment to Powershell commands for remote CLI administration of vSphere?
Clearly they found enough advantages to justify actively ditching their existing solution and *switch* to Powershell...
"As far as I'm aware anything that works in a command prompt work in Powershell?"
I don't think PUSHD works in PowerShell and I suspect there is other stuff, too, because if it were true that PowerShell was completely compatible then CMD.EXE could have been retired a decade ago and it clearly wasn't.
For the curious, I'm sure Mr Chen's blog has several articles that tell us why CMD lived on after PS appeared. Here's one ... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31383 ... which isn't actually CMD- or PowerShell-specific.
Not everything works in a Powershell console. Legacy Perl scripts are the only thing I can remember at the moment but there are others. Biggest improvement to CMD has been allowing Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V to cut and paste. Not having to reach for the mouse to paste when you're typing is so much better. If I could remap Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V to Alt-W/Ctrl-Y for the whole of Windows, I wouldn't then keep pressing Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V in Emacs.
I know - I’m still pissed off at the changes made to the bios font when IBM released VGA. CGA for the win - who needs more than 16 shades in text mode? Or more than 640*200 resolution, black and white, in ‘high resolution’ graphics mode?
Grumble grumble, I remember when this was all fields. Kids today. When I were a lad, I had to walk 50 miles to school in cardboard shoes with a laptop abacus. And we were grateful.
100 miles? Oh you lucky little nipper! In my day I had to walk 200 miles to school and 300 back. A mile was far longer back then too. All you youngun's with your modern conveniences like traininers and shoes and boots...Boots! In my day, we didn't even have feet!
You don't know you're born, the lot of you.
I used to fill my car every night with two Tektronix digital storage scopes+signal generators from work (Companies trusted you implicitly back then, nothing to sign) in order to get my coursework done and write 40 page documents easily, including inline equations using an Acorn Archimedes running the fabulous Impression 2.
A feat that even (shitty) Mircosoft Word struggles with today, but really struggled back then. I've hated Microsoft Word ever since, well mainly the way it formatted compared to Impression 2.
How we've come full circle. Arm processors running the show again. Archimedes was 20 years ahead of it's time. My 6502/Risc programming background back then, is still is very useful today, actually, never more so.
El Reg should dev a button to insert the regularly occurring "When I were a lad" Monty Python sketch. Or implement additional points for the individual who gets back to; when I were a lad we only had Hydrogen and had to craft our own heavy elements, bare foot in the snow.
Just noticed there is another on in https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/08/04/on_call/
El Reg should dev a button to insert the regularly occurring "When I were a lad" Monty Python sketch.
Pfft, youth of today. Don't know tha's born.
When I were a lad we used't 'av 't get by quoting ' At Last the 1948 Show'; and be damn glad of the opportunity I can tell thee.
Alternatively, and this works on older versions of Windows too, just install ‘Console’ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/console/) and get this benefit and many more besides. And if Console isn’t your cup of tea, there are plenty of other alternatives available just a quick Google away.
My preferred colour scheme is Ubuntu’s auberginey palette (and typeface, for that matter). Using Console (and the settings for Terminal on my Mac), I’ve given all my computers a little Ubuntu makeover!
You wouldn't like the VT220 if you had to use one today. I had to use one yesterday - and it gave me a cracking headache. Up til then I'd forgotten all about the CRT induced headache, engendered by CRTs with low refresh rates - and the ghosting.
My first monitor was a natty amber job. I can't remember the manufacturer - I always think of it as an Elephant, despite the fact that Elephant Memory Systems made disks not Monitors, because I stuck an elephant sticker on the casing - the sticker came free in a box of disks. Happy days.
But, to answer your question, it's a kind of very dark aubergine purple with white text - the current Ubuntu terminal colour scheme. I can't remember a mud or turd coloured version.
The old colour scheme has two brightnesses of each colour - the new one doesn't - why? I don't think I've ever seen the murky brown used, but that's now been promoted to yellow, while the yellow (which is used *everywhere*) now becomes a slightly tinted white. Red now becomes pink, the two greens are the same, the two purples are the same and so on.
It's just fiddling for the sake of fiddling.
As Microsoft are now getting interested in colour again, perhaps they could sort out the monochromatic and flat interface abomination in Windows 10 and everything it touched.
I am worried a bit though about the premise that "colours don't display right". What happens to all those HTML colour codes in all those little web pages around the world. Surely that's a bigger problem than the command line ???
I wonder if any of the people working on Windows have ever heard of Pantone colour charts and surely if the monitor are different, then that's a problem for the video driver to sort out, not the requesting application.
Pantone colours are spot colours - they are specific colours created mixing specific inks. They are not nor RGB nor CMYK ones. There are conversion charts to approximate a Pantone colour using RGB or CMYK, but not all colours can be easily approximated.
The video driver and the video card have no way to know how a monitor display colours until a specific device reads them out of the monitors and tell them...
It is true most default settings for today LCD monitors are high brightness and high contrast. As soon as you calibrate your monitor, it looks very different.
I have a print industry tattoo (rubber based ink) on one finger from when it got caught. Don't use your fingers to adjust the delivery feed wheels on an offset.
When the offset abruptly stopped, my mate upstairs shouted "I think you need a cup of tea" whilst I switched off to pull my bruised finger out.
As soon as you calibrate your monitor, it looks very different.
Exactly, its a display driver / display device issue to calibrate colour, you don't fix display accuracy issues in your application, you simply request "blue"
The article says that its a response to a "modern monitors" issue, so it should be fixed by a monitor / monitor driver related fix.
I would like to observe that this has nothing to do with cmd.exe, except in so far that cmd.exe is a console Windows program, and will therefore pop up a console when being executed (and when it isn't invoked from a parent which already has a console).
It has also nothing to do with DOS: cmd.exe is perfectly normal Windows application, just one which happens to request a console. (I should note that automatically getting the console window is the *only* difference between console and non-console .EXE's in Windows: a console application can still create additional "normal" windows, and basically do whatever a non-console .EXE can do.)
Doesn't anybody use JP Software's Take Command anymore?
Hang on a moment, M$ on a number of occasions have told us that their new (insert version here) OS, was built from the ground up and is the most secure operating system in the world.
Someone should explain to Microturd what "built from the ground up" means
They should also explain to them that you can't claim "most secure" to untested code that has not yet stood the test of time
Mine is the coat with the by-default disabled firewall in the pocket
Green on black on a nice Falco glass TTY was the best. Some even had three RS-232 ports so you could switch between sessions on three different System V servers or stream S-records through to your Pentica Mime 600 in-circuit emulator with a suitable escape sequence. Once I'd discovered Emacs I was in heaven! :-)
I'll hobble over to the coat rack ...
Microsoft wants to get rid of CMD. As the first step in that direction they are changing the CMD color scheme to match its successor powershell.
Then end of cmd and the reign of powershell just takes another forced update.
Are you ready?
Or will you "bash" the whole idea?
"Yup, that's all. Colours. No new syntax. Nothing cloudy. Just colours."
But ... but ... but ... how about a proper set of ledgible fixed pitch fonts, how about the ability to actually re-size the terminal window like any sane terminal? how about a sane copy/paste mechanism?
Basically, make the bloody thing like PuTTY please.
This reminds me of the kerfuffle back in the late 1980s, when half-height floppy drives first came out. Suddenly, portables (think laptops that weighed over a stone) could have two floppy drives! At the same time!
Still, some fretted. Would there be any problems switching from a full-height drive to a half-height? This was not helped at all when some companies brazenly started advertising that their software worked on systems with the half-height drives. This, of course, got people worried that their competitor's software wouldn't, and it took a while before people realized that a floppy drive was a floppy drive, regardless of how high it was.
So, MS is changing the colour? Well, I've not started a CMD console in years; everything is done within JPSoft's excellent TCC (and freeware TCC/LE) replacements. If an instance of cmd.exe must be run, the tabbed cmder console is much better...
Did the Insider chumps who 'do testing' and 'give feedback' to Microsoft ever consider the possibility that some of us might be colour blind?
You think it's cute, funny or trendy to willy-nilly do a 'makeover' of CMD.EXE without giving thought to greater ramifications?
Sheer idiocy from Microsoft these days. Case in point: Skype.
"Did the Insider chumps who 'do testing' and 'give feedback' to Microsoft ever consider the possibility that some of us might be colour blind?"
I do not believe that MS act on feedback from Insiders so I don't think it is fair to blame them.
Actually, I'm not sure what motivates most of what MS do these days. If they really wanted to improve the appearance of Windows on modern monitors, perhaps they could finish implementing High DPI support in all the applets that ship with a vanilla installation. (Until fairly recently, nearly all the MMC snap-ins for the "old" Control Panel were blurry shit at >125% mag. They've address the most commonly used ones in recent builds but not all. Given how easy it is to add the relevant manifest entry, and given how that's all you need to do if you learned your Windows programming from Mr Petzold, this is frankly embarrassing.)
If you have Cygwin installed then you can just use Bash commands directly from the Windows command shell. The Windows shell isn't really worth a damn, its usable for trivial things, but you can't write worthwhile scripts in it and anything you do is incompatible with the rest of the world so installing Cygwin gives you a degree of flexibility that outstrips anything MSFT has to offer, including their Linux on Windows support.
(Cygwin?? A lot of professional development toolsets are Linux based, they either use a third party language (Eclipse / Java) or Cygwin. Applications developers won't necessarily see this but if you work with embedded products or hardware you're essentially only using Windows because IT/Corporate policy demands it.)
You guys 'n gals realise that it has been possible to change all the colors, font and size of the console window since XP at least (and possibly '98)? Just right click on windows title and select the the Properties dropdown - color away (avoid black-on-black etc. . . .).
All MS has added is a few newer tweaks, none of which are that earthshaking, and made a whole new fuss about it, as though they'd given us all something new.
And yes, behavior IS different between PowerShell and Command Shell.
Mac
I think this article is about a different set of colours. (Otherwise Microsoft, who presumable are perfectly aware of the feature you refer to, wouldn't be making an announcement about it.) I think this article is talking about the colours used by arbitrary console programs (is this the old VGA palette?) rather than the ones used by CMD.EXE.
Xenix was not just a shell, it was a true UNIX™ port. Obviously it required a much heftier machine than DOS, but it was itself the most-widely-used UNIX for a while.
Note that in MS DOS 2.0, Microsoft introduced a lot of UNIX compatibility features (directories, file descriptors, a primitive form of redirection). At the time MS saw Xenix as the long-term successor of DOS.
Later they changed that to OS/2, and ultimately they decided to go for it alone with Windows NT.
Xenix was actually licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in 1979. It was the exact same bog standard PDP11 Version 7 Unix that I had access to at UCB. Microsoft never actually coded anything[0] for Xenix, rather they sub-licensed the AT&T source code to third parties, who did the actual coding and porting.
For example, it was SCO who ported it to the IBM PC's 8086/8088 architecture in roughly 1983. Yes, the very same machine that shipped with MS-DOS. Most of us yawned[1] ... although looking back, it was a pretty good hack by SCO![2] Hindsight's 20/20 ...
The name Xenix came about because Ma Bell couldn't (or didn't want to) let them use the UNIX name. The claim for jealousy guarding the trademarked UNIX name was because MaBell was regulated and wasn't allowed to get into the retail trade, although that always rang a trifle hollow to me.
Before SCO's port was released, there was a TRS-68000 version, a Zilog Z8001 port, and an Altos 8086 version (not necessarily in that order, my mind is concatenating time). There were several others. Microsoft didn't write any of them, rather the third-party companies in question did the coding.
A version of SCO Xenix is available for the download here: ftp://www.tuhs.org/UnixArchive/Distributions/Other/Xenix/ ... Don't blame me for the www in that URL.
[0] Unless you consider adding Redmond copyright crap to a few header files "coding".
[1] Those of us working on BSD at the time looked on Xenix as BSD's somewhat insane & slightly neurotic little brother.
[2] Last time I posted something along these lines, I asked if anyone could remember who ported Xenix to Apple's Lisa. Turns out it was SCO ... I have a copy, my Lisa looks a lot happier running a un*x than the OS she came with. (Don't worry, all you purists, I have the stock software for her, too.)
Thanks for the clues-- I knew it was a MS thing (or a SCO thing?) and it made me guess they are addicted to the letter X (Xbox, DirectX, ActiveX, etc). Bender says he prefers the term extortion because the X makes it sound cool. But essentially everything I 'knew' about Xenix I learned from a strange bit of early-WWW fiction, which now seems oddly appropriate...
I had a nice, relaxing Christmas. I drank beer. I ate sleeping pills. I played with my crayons.
I used the 'old' colors...the new colors are part of the plot against me.
I made Christmas gifts for my friends, with scissors and paper, like we used to do at the 'Home,' only with real scissors, not like those crummy plastic ones Mrs. Prudence made us use. I sent all my friends some of those cut-out dolls that you open up and there's ten or twelve of them in a row that you can string around your Christmas tree.
They didn't have heads. Mrs. Prudence always threw my cut-out dolls away if they didn't have heads and made me take extra medicine...and punished me. But now I'm not in the 'Home' anymore, and I can make them without heads, or arms, or legs, or anyway that I want.
Maybe by 2021 they'll give the option to put the scroll bar on the right side OR the left side, or have no scrollbar at all, or resize to something other than 80 columns, or hide the menubar, or hit F11 to go to utter full-screen mode and back-- like I can now, without even a lien on my soul.
It's easy to change the size of the Command Prompt screen. Go into Properties and change the font (size).
I also use TCC/LE. In part, I like it for the pdir command:
pdir g:\2017 /s /(dy-m-d zm fpn) >> j:\2017.txt
that sort of thing, in batch files, to have up-to-date listings, in a format of my choice, of offline files.
At best, they're making one thing better, while making a whole bunch of other things slightly worse. Typical. For example, I like the colour bright yellow. An earlier poster liked it against blue, I like it against deep red / maroon. That's what I use when editing text files with ConTEXT 0.98.3 (the later version would occasionally lose its mind, for me). In the article, the line with bright yellow against all backgrounds looks washed out in comparison to the Old Way.
With old monochrome monitors, I think the determinative factor in usability may have been the quality of the equipment rather than the chosen colour. I had a Televideo green monitor, rock-solid, never suffered eyestrain. Made me feel like a real programmer (psssst, don't look at the CODE!). Amber screens (whether black text on amber or amber text on black) tended to give the impression of fleetingness, like an inaudible buzz. Yet you could use the same colours now on an LED without that impression. Even worse were the "paper white" screens I encountered. To get the paper white colour required more complex technology, but that didn't remove the pressure of meeting a price point, so they tended to use a cheaper version of that technology. Today, we're all accustomed to paper white, few complain about it except in darkened rooms. It was the application of technology that stank, not the concept.
Hrg Nenad (yup, that;s his name!) at www.softwareok.com does a lovely ColorConsole app that has lots and lots of neat tricks to it.
I never had trouble with the old console and knew all the switches by heart. Use'ta love writing batch files that batch files aren't supposed to be able to do.
But what do I care? I installed bash on Windows 10 and am back in familiar territory.
Mac