Re: Colored kernel messages on serial console

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 01:24:24PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> 
> I assume your're actually talking about the ISO 6429 parameters for
> ANSI X3.64's SGR sequence; that seems to be what "ANSI color" gets used
> to mean.  (As far as I know ANSI has not actually standardized anything
> for colour - or, ANSI being *A*NSI, I guess I should say "color".  In
> case someone knows - am I out of date in that?)
> 

He probably is but it is not the only way colour is handled on
terminals.  If you want to see it in its full glory look at
libcurses/color.c and wonder at the hoops.

I have to wonder who gets to choose the default colours and by what
mechanism they can be tweaked.  It all sounds rather complicated and
unwieldy for something of, IMHO, dubious benefit.

> > so that I'll get my familiar green kernel messages (after migrating
> > from wscons to a serial console setup recently).
> 
> > How insane is this?
> 
> Unless it defaults off, I would call it extremely annoying if/when I
> ever run into it (which admittedly would probably be rarely-to-never).
> 

I would just say no - it turns grepping the kernel log into a painful
exercise to say the least.

> I am [32mquite[0m thoroughly [30;42;1msick[0m of seeing the resultant
> output corruption.  A few programs (notably gdb) are borderline
> unusable as a result.  (I even ran into one thing brain-damaged enough
> to wedge on startup if it's not talking to X3.64, but that is only
> tangentially related.)
> 

Not only gdb but a lot of other things too.  On a personal level I
cannot deal with colour highlighting due to a condition with my eyes, I
need a strong contrast to easily read things, some colour combinations
are illegible to me.  Also, you have to feel sympathy for the people
with colour blindness, they are being marginalised for no really good
reason apart from somebody elses so called aesthetics.

I know that gdb is really bad at this, I couldn't find a single "turn
the colour off" knob, there seemed to be a whole bunch you had to tweak
which really sucks.

> If I want Linux, I know - all too well - where to find it.
> 

My first command after logging into redhat linux is "unalias -a" to
remove all the crap aliasing they foist on you.  Sure you can
unconfigure it, on one machine its not too bad, 10 is annoying, 100 is
just damn annoying - why should one have to resort to some automated
configuration state tool (take your pick...) to nobble such an egregious
thing.

At work I used to call it "Unicorn rainbow vomit"

-- 
Brett Lymn
--
Sent from my NetBSD device.

"We are were wolves",
"You mean werewolves?",
"No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely",
"Oh"