I don’t have enough recent experience with pi to really offer a specific critique, so this will be somewhat general (and more than somewhat opinionated.)
First off, to the original point… color (or other emphasis) should be used as a callout to highlight the most important things. When everything is important, nothing is. I struggle to comprehend how I could conceivably gain value by having up to 60 different color coded elements on my screen. That’s just too much to be memorized or fit any intuitive framework. I’d lose track of what they mean far before 60, and just start tuning them all out. (not to mention that ‘roles’ like “red on red” border on nonsensical.) Maybe you have 60 different semantic roles that are valid, but it seems like the default for the vast majority should be no custom color as it’s not adding anything. Let the user go all Pollock on it, if they must, with custom config.
Some other miscellaneous points wrt TUIs:
Decide if you actually want a tui, or if you’re trying to build a web gui in the terminal (because it’s “easy”, “trendy”, “l33t h4x0r”…) and importing all of that baggage. I suspect a lot of the trends I’m seeing (and railing against) are at least partly the result of importing web design aesthetics and approaches to tui and cli tools.
Don’t lean on panels/panes/frames/windows where you can avoid it. You likely need far less of that than you think or want. They can be useful, but in moderation, and hopefully without lots of excess decorations.
Ruthlessly strip out chartjunk (tuijunk?) in general. Can you do without something? Can you do it with less ‘ink’? Can you do it without extra emphasis/colors? Can you do it without emoji or dingbats?
I struggle to comprehend how I could conceivably gain value by having up to 60 different color coded elements on my screen
You don’t. That’s how how this system works at all. You can run Pi yourself and you will discover that Pi is very conservative when it comes to colors.
I don’t have enough recent experience with pi to really offer a specific critique, so this will be somewhat general (and more than somewhat opinionated.)
First off, to the original point… color (or other emphasis) should be used as a callout to highlight the most important things. When everything is important, nothing is. I struggle to comprehend how I could conceivably gain value by having up to 60 different color coded elements on my screen. That’s just too much to be memorized or fit any intuitive framework. I’d lose track of what they mean far before 60, and just start tuning them all out. (not to mention that ‘roles’ like “red on red” border on nonsensical.) Maybe you have 60 different semantic roles that are valid, but it seems like the default for the vast majority should be no custom color as it’s not adding anything. Let the user go all Pollock on it, if they must, with custom config.
Some other miscellaneous points wrt TUIs:
score 1 · canonical
You don’t. That’s how how this system works at all. You can run Pi yourself and you will discover that Pi is very conservative when it comes to colors.
score 1 · canonical