iterm2: apple script theme looks different from legacy itermcolors theme

[alexwforsythe]

I've been using the old itermcolors theme for a long time, and it looks great. I tried switching to Tinty, but the corresponding apple script theme it uses makes the terminal look different. Specifically, the background is much lighter.

Is this expected? Do the scripts need to be updated to better match the legacy themes?

base16-tomorrow-night-eighties.itermcolors

base16-tomorrow-night-eighties.scpt

I thought maybe using tinted-shell instead of tinted-terminal would help, but it looks different from both of them!

base16-tomorrow-night-eighties.sh

[clach04]

@alexwforsythe I don't know, the place to start would be looking at https://github.com/tinted-theming/schemes/ where the "source" for the colors come from.

What makes reading the iterm colors tricky, at least for me, is that it's not hex RGB which I personally find easier to read/compare.

I tend not to use the shell colors, those are always inconsistent for me across terminals. I recommend focusing on the first 8 / 16 colors in a terminal color scheme. I use my tool https://github.com/clach04/terminal_style_toolkit/blob/main/pyshow_colors2.py to do the comparison but there are others.

Without digging more, I'd suspect that you are correct and that the colors are off (when compared with iterm) but the color scheme repo is where to start. If you have the time and energy to dig into it that would be helpful.

As a heads up, I have some Base16 (only) tomorrow themes in https://github.com/clach04/base16-tomorrow-schemes that I'm still collating. I did recently get a PR merged for updating some of the tomorrow schemes. What makes Tomorrow tricky to pin down is that there are different versions/variants that are all named the same! Even the original upstream one is inconsistent (with itself).

I personally love Tomorrow, but as a text editor scheme - it doesn't cover ANSI well... but tinted-theming/schemes#71 is a new Base24 implementation of one of the variants, which makes it more suitable for the terminal. Help/work is definitely needed in this area.

[JulianVidal]

I have investigated this issue and I believe iTerm2's AppleScript API may be interpreting color values as Generic RGB instead of sRGB.

When setting #3b3228 as background color using 16-bit values {15163, 12850, 10280}, Digital Color Meter shows:

• Generic RGB mode: #3b3227 ✓ (matches input)
• sRGB mode: #4c4135 (lighter than expected)

This would explain why the generated colors don't match - if the templates are generating sRGB values but iTerm2 is interpreting them as Generic RGB, the colors will appear lighter than intended.

Workaround: I've created a conversion script that transforms the sRGB values in the AutoLaunch script which runs in the hook. convert_iterm_color.py.

I've also opened a feature request with iTerm2 to clarify/add sRGB support: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/12565