ANSI 8 inconsistency.

[j-c-m]

BASE16 style:

BASE24 style:

Historically base16 used base03 as ansi 8 (which I think looks correct, on most themes, a subjective opinion)

Right now both style guides list base03 as ANSI 8, but all templates use base02. For base16 base03 is styled as ansi 8, bright black. For base24 base03 is ansi 8, but terminal (Grey), but base02 is ansi19 terminal bright black.

I would propose that base24 style is matched to base16 for base02 & base03, and base03 is used universally for ansi 8 bright black.

[j-c-m]

A little more background, this is what I am ultimately playing with to get slightly better base16/24 -> ANSI mappings in terminals.

ANSI experiment. No 16-21 remap.
Brown (0F) -> ANSI 3
Orange (09) -> ANSI 9
Yellow (0A) -> ANSI 11

Rather than map grayscale in 18-21, move them to grayscale range of 256
color (232-255)

Darkest Gray (01) -> 236
Dark Gray (02) -> 238
Light Gray (04) -> 243
White (06) -> 253

j-c-m/tinted-shell@ac37bbe

[JamyGolden]

Yeah it should definitely be consistent between base16 and base24 and mapping 16-21 doesn’t make sense to me either since there is no fallback and would just look broken if those colours aren’t mapped.

One potential issue with mapping 236, 238, 243 and 253 is that it doesn’t work for light schemes. So far we’ve had matching variables doing “the same thing” like 01/02 being backgrounds, 05 being foreground etc and while a template is aware of light vs dark theme (or can be), an ansi pass through theme would have an issue here. I haven’t thought about this more than just reading your comment though so maybe I’m not taking something into consideration.

[j-c-m]

Yeah it should definitely be consistent between base16 and base24 and mapping 16-21 doesn’t make sense to me either since there is no fallback and would just look broken if those colours aren’t mapped.

One potential issue with mapping 236, 238, 243 and 253 is that it doesn’t work for light schemes. So far we’ve had matching variables doing “the same thing” like 01/02 being backgrounds, 05 being foreground etc and while a template is aware of light vs dark theme (or can be), an ansi pass through theme would have an issue here. I haven’t thought about this more than just reading your comment though so maybe I’m not taking something into consideration.

With the light schemes, if the changing of the colors is successful, it just reverses those 4 in the 232-255 grayscale map, which would look slightly off for any non base16 aware app relying on them not being changed.

I don't really know what relies on the current 16-21 map, which I also again find not that useful because it's not always reliable. The big win for me in this experiment was moving 16,17 down into the 0-15 ansi mix.

I am going to experiment more, even seeing what the elimination of the extra grayscale does, I think most themed terminal applications access the base16 directly and not through 16-21 term colors (exception I've found so far is vim themes on 256 color terms that aren't truecolor/termguicolor capable, which luckily are becoming more rare these days, but they are also unlikely to set the 16-21 colors correctly as well, so they probably weren't working anyways).