Qt Merges Wayland Color Management “color-management-v1”
The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland’s color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series… ⌘ Read more

We got some colors in the sky: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-11-04/

Some cool color combinations: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-10-31/

We had some gray soup with the occasional fine rain with strong wind gusts. Despite the bad forecast we took the train to Geislingen/Steige and strolled up to the Helfenstein castle ruin. All the colorful leaves were so beautiful, it didn’t matter that the sun was behind thick layers of clouds.

We then continued to the Ödenturm (lit. boring tower). By then the wind had picked up by quite a bit, just as the weatherman predicted. We were very positively surprised that the Swabian Jura Association had opened up the tower. Between May and October, the tower is typically only manned on Sundays and holidays between 10 and 17 o’clock. But yesterday was Saturday and no holiday. The lovely lady up there told us that they’re currently experimenting with opening up on Saturday, too, because there are some highly motivated members responsible for the tower.

We were the very first visitors on that day. Last Sunday, when the weather lived up to the weekday’s name, they counted 128 people up in the tower. Very impressive.

The wind gusts were howling around the tower. Luckily, there are glass windows. So, it was quite pleasant up in the tower room. Chatting with the tower guard for a while, we got even luckier: the sun came out! That was really awesome. The photos don’t do justice. As always, it looked way more stunning in person.

Thanks to all the volunteers who make it possible to enjoy the view from the thirty odd meters up there. That certainly made our day!

After signing the guestbook we climbed down the staircase and returned to the station and headed back. The train even arrived on time. What a great little trip!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-die-burgruine-helfenstein-und-den-oedenturm-2025-10-25/

The colorful autumn looks stunning, even with a gray sky. https://lyse.isobeef.org/spaziergang-zum-oedenturm-2025-10-12/

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/

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.

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/

Love all the funky colors though 😎

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

Image

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

I wrote about making Glenda’s Joy Division cover (with updated colors and a link to source): http://a.9srv.net/b/2024-11-23

Thank you @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org - yeah they are kinda crazy color wheels

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Unless you are stripping stuff on your twts, there is no much to implement. Things will be bold , italics , underlined , and so on, on a client that can render them. Since jenny uses Mutt, I can use my own regex in it to color them as I like. That’s pretty much it.

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Colors for Programmers https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/03/11/colors.html #techtips #programming #design #color #format #math