PowerShell Colours: Solarized Canon

This is a pair of scripts that will configure PowerShell and PSReadline to work with a canon Solarized 16-colour terminal palette.

Compatibility

I mainly use PowerShell 7, so I have only lightly/occasionally tested this with Windows PowerShell.

There's code there to support PSReadLine before 2.0.0, but I haven't tested that code since updating to 2.0.0.

It is designed to work with Windows Terminal, with a canon Solarized colour scheme, either Light or Dark; it overrides the only values that differ between Light and Dark.

Specifically, it is tested with Windows Terminal 1.2 Preview, but it will work with only slight, avoidable, issues with cursor colour in Windows Terminal 1.1.

In theory, it ought to work with other terminal emulators, but I haven't tested any. As long as the terminal emulator is either using ConPTY, or maps the ConHost colours to ANSI colours the same way that ConPTY does, I expect it to work.

I haven't tested this with PowerShell on platforms other than Windows.

Usage

To use these scripts, ensure your terminal emulator has the correct colours mapped to the ANSI codes per Solarized. Note that per Canon colours VS cmd-colors-solarized, a Windows-based terminal emulator might have been set up for a brightness-inverted set of ANSI codes.

Specifically, per Canon Solarized palettes in Windows Terminal, Windows Terminal's built-in Solarized schemes are incorrect, and need to be overridden.

Then run one of these scripts as part of your profile, e.g., I have the following block in my PowerShell Profile:

# Solarized Light when elevated
# https://serverfault.com/a/97599
if (([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal] [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole]::Administrator)) {
  & (Join-Path -Path (Split-Path -Parent -Path $PROFILE) -ChildPath 'powershell-colours-solarized-canon\Set-SolarizedLightColorDefaultsCanon.ps1')
}
else {
  & (Join-Path -Path (Split-Path -Parent -Path $PROFILE) -ChildPath 'powershell-colours-solarized-canon\Set-SolarizedDarkColorDefaultsCanon.ps1')
}

This gives me the effect that if I am running an Administrator PowerShell, I get Solarized Light, and otherwise I get Solarized Dark.

Administrator Colours for Bash

You can achieve a similar effect in MSYS2 (but not Git Bash) with the following:

# Solarized Light when elevated
# If we have the "High Mandatory Level" group, it means we're elevated
# Git4Windows doesn't have `getent`, but you shouldn't be running that elevated anyway.
if [[ -n "$(command -v getent)" ]] && id -G | grep -q "$(getent -w group 'S-1-16-12288' | cut -d: -f2)"
        then echo -e '\e]10;rgb:65/7b/83\e\\\e]11;rgb:fd/f6/e3\e\\\e]12;rgb:00/2b/36\e\'
fi

Canon colours VS cmd-colors-solarized

Historically, using Solarized with Conhost-based programs like PowerShell or CMD required cmd-colors-solarized which included a script to configure the Conhost 16-colour palette for Solarized by modifying the shortcuts to launch tools like PowerShell, paired with scripts that configured PowerShell, on which these scripts are based.

However, the palette mapping used in cmd-colours-solarized is different from the mappings given in Solarized itself. All the 'bright' palette entries in Solarized became 'Dark' in cmd-colours-solarized, in effect flipping the 'bold' attribute of the ANSI code for a given palette entry.

This was not really a problem until recently, when Windows Terminal and related ConPTY work meant that ANSI colour codes could be expected to do the right thing on both Windows and non-Windows platforms. Windows Terminal's Solarized colour palette maps the ANSI codes per Solarized, not cmd-colors-solarized.

The upshot is that using scripts from the cmd-colors-solarized repository under Windows Terminal, will give you colours where you expect fg/bg tones, and vice-versa. This isn't visible in PowerShell itself, since Windows Terminal is actually responsible for the background/foreground/cursor colours; however PS-Readline syntax highlighting and other line-affecting operations will show the difference.

Canon Solarized palettes in Windows Terminal

As of Windows Terminal 1.1, the bundled Solarized palettes are actually non-canon, as they swap the black and brblack colours to better-support users who enable the Solarized palette without the requisite PowerShell configuration changes.

So to use this configuration, I suggest the following schemes:

  "schemes": [
    {
      "name": "Canon Solarized Dark",
      "foreground": "#839496",
      "background": "#002B36",
      "cursorColor": "#FDF6E3",
      "black": "#073642",
      "red": "#DC322F",
      "green": "#859900",
      "yellow": "#B58900",
      "blue": "#268BD2",
      "purple": "#D33682",
      "cyan": "#2AA198",
      "white": "#EEE8D5",
      "brightBlack": "#002B36",
      "brightRed": "#CB4B16",
      "brightGreen": "#586E75",
      "brightYellow": "#657B83",
      "brightBlue": "#839496",
      "brightPurple": "#6C71C4",
      "brightCyan": "#93A1A1",
      "brightWhite": "#FDF6E3"
    },
    {
      "name": "Canon Solarized Light",
      "foreground": "#657B83",
      "background": "#FDF6E3",
      "cursorColor": "#002B36",
      "black": "#073642",
      "red": "#DC322F",
      "green": "#859900",
      "yellow": "#B58900",
      "blue": "#268BD2",
      "purple": "#D33682",
      "cyan": "#2AA198",
      "white": "#EEE8D5",
      "brightBlack": "#002B36",
      "brightRed": "#CB4B16",
      "brightGreen": "#586E75",
      "brightYellow": "#657B83",
      "brightBlue": "#839496",
      "brightPurple": "#6C71C4",
      "brightCyan": "#93A1A1",
      "brightWhite": "#FDF6E3"
    }
  ],

This will ensure that when you use these schemes with, e.g., an ssh session to a Linux host that is also configured for Solarized, you will get the correct result.

As noted, everything except the foreground, background, and cursorColor are the same in both schemes. Any tools that support switching between Light and Dark on the fly will function correctly. So the choice of Light or Dark wil be down to which you prefer when using applications that don't switch on the fly, e.g., bash.

If using Windows Terminal 1.1, and you want to be able to switch between Light and Dark dynamically, then you will need to change the cursorColor to something that is visible in both, as the colour-switch ANSI code was unimplemented until Windows Terminal 1.2.