Lexical differential highlighting instead of syntax highlighting
Recently there is a lot of discussion around syntax highlighting ( 1, 2, 3), which reminds me of this old post I read a while ago.

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Colored Highlighter - A terminal tool to highlight specific words in your command output with colors
I needed to take a look at some live logs and quickly analyze some old ones, but I couldn’t find anything effective to highlight terms, except for esoteric sed and awk commands.
So I built ch - Colored Highlighter - a simple terminal tool to highlight specific words in your command output with colors. Perfect for tailing logs, debugging, and making command output more readable.

Try it out, all feedback is welcome!

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Is my cat a cream color or orange ⌘ Read more

Traffic lights with four colors and a new white light are coming
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The colorful autumn looks stunning, even with a gray sky. https://lyse.isobeef.org/spaziergang-zum-oedenturm-2025-10-12/

When I’m asked for the third time in a row to change a button color ⌘ Read more

As ocean temperatures warm, fish in Western Australia are heading south
Colorful tropical fish are heading south along the WA coast, including around Rottnest. This sounds spectacular, but it’s not. ⌘ Read more

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Does anyone know of an OsmAnd rendering style that resembles OpenCycleMap? It should highlight cycle networks with vibrant colors and fade everything else. Currently, I plan bike tours by first opening OpenCycleMap on my PC to get an idea and then using OsmAnd on my phone to actually plan the tour. Ideally, I would just use OsmAnd. ⌘ Read more

What a crazy color temperature this yellow orange was in person! Sick lighting this evening: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-15/

We just had some lovely colors again: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-12/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somebody knew what he was doing, great shots! Also, quite interesting to see the color and brightness change.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Very nice colors dude! 😅

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

Surprisingly, the sky got quite some lovely colors this evening. I approve! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-08-21/

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You can explicitly use colors in manpages. I saw this in the apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:

https://movq.de/v/de5ab72016/s.png

Makes little sense to me. I’m glad that most manpages don’t do this. I wouldn’t want unicorn vomit all over the place.

Using colors can be done using the low level commands \m and \M:

.TH foo_program 3
\m[blue]I'm blue\m[], da ba dee.
\m[red]\M[yellow]I'm red on yellow.\m[]\M[]
This is quite horrible.

https://movq.de/v/394282ec75/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:

https://movq.de/v/81219d7f7a/s.png

Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by … drumroll … overwriting TERMCAP entries of less in your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m'      # Bold
    export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m'           # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m'    # Underline
    export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m'           # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1                     # Needed since groff 1.23

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I also wondered for a very long time why nobody improved the man experience in the terminal. I’d love to see links and more colors.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

Folks, another unicorn vomited in our sky tonight: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-07-19/

We covered quite some ground in the two and a half hours today. The weather was nice, mostly cloudy and just 23°C. That’s also why we decided to take a longer tour. We saw four deer in the wild, three of which I managed to just ban on film, quality could be better, though. My camera produced a hell lot of defocused photos this time. Not sure what’s going on with the autofocus. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-07-10/

When the sun came out, colors were just beautiful:

We got some colorful spots in the sky this evening: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-07-08/

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

i ordered some fun colorful new minidiscs so i can finally get back to recording my mixes :D looking forward to it

Deals: M4 MacBook Air for $812! MacBook Pro 16″ M4 Max 48GB/1TB for $3440, & More
Amazon isn’t letting up on the great deals, with the M4 Macbook Air 13″ model now being offered at just $812 for the base 13″ model with 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Midnight color. You can also get great deals on other colors, but the cheapest by far is the dark Midnight color at the … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/06/03/deals-m4-macbook-air-for-812-macbook-pro-16 … ⌘ Read more

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How to have the browser pick a contrasting color in CSS
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10 Times Governments Banned Colors for Bizarre Reasons
When we think of banned things, we tend to imagine books, political speech, or the occasional controversial cartoon. But throughout history, governments have cracked down on something far stranger: colors. Whether tied to class, ideology, or sheer paranoia, certain shades have been restricted, outlawed, or made dangerous to wear—all because they said too much without […]

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Deals: Up to $173 Off M4 MacBook Air in 13″ & 15″
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IT ROCKS!! oh my god do they do their art on paper with colored pencils then scan it & tweak everything digitally….. it looks it…… sick :0

Forgot to post these here: A bunch of Mandelbrot images using the trans, ace, and aro color palettes.

More and full res PNGs:

https://movq.de/v/c732f4178a/

https://movq.de/v/fa024865a8/

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Love all the funky colors though 😎

I’m keeping this color scheme on my laptop for now:

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Why did Windows 7, for a few months, log on slower if you have a solid color background?
Time for another story from Raymond Chen, about why, in Windows 7, logging in took 30 seconds if you had set a solid colour as your background. Windows 7’s logon system needs to wait for a number of tasks to be completed, like creating the taskbar, populating the desktop with icons, and setting the background. If all of those tasks are completed or 30 seconds … ⌘ Read more

Why did Windows 7, for a few months, log on slower if you have a solid color background?
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Deals: Save $100 on New M4 MacBook Air
Amazon is offering up to $102 off the price of the brand new M4 MacBook Air series in select configurations and color options, in both 13″ and 15″ display sizes. The M4 series MacBook Air features an M4 chip with Apple Intelligence support, a Liquid Retina LCD display, 12MP camera with Center Stage, Touch ID, … Read More ⌘ Read more

Istio publishes results of ztunnel security audit
Passes with flying colors Istio’s ambient mode splits the service mesh into two distinct layers: Layer 7 processing (the “waypoint proxy”), which remains powered by the traditional Envoy proxy; and a secure overlay (the “zero-trust tunnel”… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Shall we remove this primary/secondary color sttting? 🧐

10 Psychological Tricks Brands Use to Influence You
You’re not just buying a product—you’re stepping into a carefully crafted psychological trap. Modern brands work with behavioral economists, neuro marketers, and data scientists to make sure everything—from colors to prices to your choices—leads you exactly where they want. These aren’t generic marketing clichés—these are real, specific strategies currently being used to win your attention, […]

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Cooking a new camera application. ⌘ Read more

10 OCD Themes That Are Not About Cleanliness
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a “mental health condition where distressing, intrusive thoughts (obsessions) trigger repetitive behaviors (compulsions) aimed at reducing anxiety or preventing something bad from occurring.” When most people think of OCD, they think of orderliness, cleanliness, color-coded closets, pristine lists, and grouping your Skittles into colors before eating them. Television and movies like […]

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UNIHIKER K10 is an ESP32-S3 based platform with TinyML and built-in sensors
The UNIHIKER K10 is an AI learning device designed for education, integrating features for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT applications. It includes a 2.8″ color screen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a camera, microphone, speaker, RGB light, and multiple sensors. The device features an ESP32-S3 Xtensa LX7 microcontroller with 512KB SRAM and 16MB flash storage. It supports […] ⌘ Read more

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