A more colourful menu

[thazhemadam]

This PR adds colours to the menu options and also makes the colours for options that can be toggled (except for debuginfo) more expressive.

Before:

After:

[timholy]

Personally I do like the new look! One concern is red/green colorblind users; it's the most common form, apparently about 1/12 of all men suffer from colorblindness https://aapos.org/glossary/color-blindness. Any chance we can choose a more colorblind-friendly set of colors?

[thazhemadam]

I went with the red-green combo because it felt intuitive - green means yes and red means no; but I didn't take color blindness into account!

Any chance we can choose a more colorblind-friendly set of colors?

Absolutely! Do you have any in mind or a personal preference from these (or any other) palettes?

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

Merging #236 (6471471) into master (6880b9e) will increase coverage by 0.03%.
The diff coverage is 100.00%.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master     #236      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   82.85%   82.89%   +0.03%     
==========================================
  Files           7        7              
  Lines        1021     1023       +2     
==========================================
+ Hits          846      848       +2     
  Misses        175      175              

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
src/ui.jl	83.87% <100.00%> (+0.35%)	⬆️

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[timholy]

I agree completely that for the non-colorblind red/green is indeed very intuitive, and that no other color combo quite matches it. But so many people are affected by some form of colorblindness that to me I think we have to account for their needs.

I am definitely not an expert and would defer to your or others' choices, but to me both the green/purple (lower left in "accessible palettes) or the blue/magenta (lower right) seem reasonably intuitive.

[timholy]

Hmm, I wonder if we need to customize the color choice dependent on system? On my Ubuntu desktop, the purple kind of fades into the background for obvious reasons:

[thazhemadam]

Hmm, I wonder if we need to customize the color choice dependent on system?

I don't think that would be a good idea as there's a good chance that any colour combination we pick might appear faded in a similar manner, depending upon users' terminal settings. I don't think there's one size that fits all for this, so we should probably just pick one colour palette and stick with it.

On a related note, I also think brighter colours might make the content more easily discernible (the yellow-pink palette here seems to be one of the brighter pairs, but I'm not sure they're the most intuitive 😅 ).

[timholy]

What about making it configurable? E.g.,

startup.jl

const CTHULHU_ON = :green
const CTHULHU_OFF = :red

for those of us who can see those colors (and default to the ones you've chosen). Internally you can use isdefined(Main, :CTHULHU_ON) ? Main.CTHULHU_ON : :blue etc. Alternatively you could look in ENV.

[thazhemadam]

What about making it configurable?

I like this idea. But what do you think about making it configurable through Cthulhu.CONFIG instead?

[anandijain]

i'd love this feature! to be friendly to colorblind, maybe we could default the coloring to be as-is (off) and leave the config to another PR?

@thazhemadam thanks for doing this

[fingolfin]

It's a pity this went stale :-(.

I agree we should take the needs of colorblind users in mind, but: my understanding is that someone who is e.g. red/green blind may not be able to differentiate between certain red and green colors (if they have the same brightness etc.), but they can still see them.

So wouldn't that mean for such a user, the effect would be that they don't see different colors -- so in effect exactly what we have no. I.e there would be no regression for them, just no improvement.

So while of course we should ultimately allow them to benefit, too (e.g. by making the colors configurable -- perhaps via Preferences.jl), wouldn't it still make sense to merge this improvement now, and add the color preferences later?