bad colour on ls listing

[Andy Stanford-Clark]

Binary package hint: nautilus

if a directory is chmod rwxrwxrwx (777) and you do an ls from the command line, the directory gets coloured blue text on dark green background, making it almost impossible to read.

Ordinary files that are chmod 777, are lime-green on white, which is perfectly readable.

Suggest removing the green background stripe.

Can be worked-around by "unalias ls" in every shell window, but would be better if it was actually fixed ;)

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

sorry - this is an "ls" bug, not nautilus - when I did "report another bug" it defaulted to where I'd raised the previous bug.

[Steve McGrath (smcgrath23)]

This would be an issue with dircolors, which is part of coreutils. I've reassigned this to the correct package for you.
Thanks for reporting!

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

I can confirm this, but the colour is actually set by having OTHERS writable. If you chmod 757 a directory, it will be printed as blue over green as stated.

And yes, it is really difficult to read, at least for me.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

I have emailed <email address hidden> about it, and will add the thread link as soon as it pops in. Marking as Triaged/Low

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Ends up this is *not* an issue on Coreutils (which I also considered, but failed to fully test). This is the response I received:

"I don't see the problem: it's readable for me when using
roxterm as my terminal emulator.

Here's what I did:

    $ mkdir other-writable
    $ chmod o+w other-writable
    $ env ls --color
    other-writable/

That final line is rendered with a blue background and
with green foreground text, "other-writable".

This sounds like a complaint about the default.
Anyone can use dircolors to set LS_COLORS to reflect their
personal preferences.

Unless it's a problem for most people[*], I'm reluctant
to change this. Besides, world-writable directories can
pose a security risk, so you might consider the annoyance
to be a *feature*. Think of it as encouragement to change
permissions to something safer.

[*] If you want to do a survey of a few people,
considering a few common terminal emulators per person,
that might provide enough evidence that a change would
be worthwhile."

And this is my response:

"On 12/30/2009 01:04 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> > I don't see the problem: it's readable for me when using
> > roxterm as my terminal emulator.
> >
(snip)
> > That final line is rendered with a blue background and
> > with green foreground text, "other-writable".
> >
You meant green background with blue foreground text, I guess.

> > This sounds like a complaint about the default.
> > Anyone can use dircolors to set LS_COLORS to reflect their
> > personal preferences.
> >
I absolutely agree, and have said so on other bugs.

> > Unless it's a problem for most people[*], I'm reluctant
> > to change this. Besides, world-writable directories can
> > pose a security risk, so you might consider the annoyance
> > to be a *feature*. Think of it as encouragement to change
> > permissions to something safer.
> >
Heh, indeed.

Meanwhile I went on and tested it on the default Linux console, plus
konsole, roxterm, Gnome terminal, and guake. Turns out the *only* one to
make the output difficult to read is Gnome terminal (all other things
being equal: default black background, default colour palette, Bitstream
Vera Mono 9).

So, if there is a problem, it is not on Coreutils.

Thank you, and sorry,"

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

As such, closing WONTFIX. If there is a problem, it is either local to the colour palette in use, or on the terminal emulator in use.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

For the record, this is the email thread: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-12/msg00292.html

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

Surprised and disappointed at this outcome - everyone agrees it's hard to read for most people.

This is a basic accessibility bug - anyone with even mildly worse eyesight than ours is going to find it even harder to read!

Contrary to what was suggested, o+w isn't *necessarily* a Bad Thing, so I shouldn't be forced to chmod my directory so I can read its name!

Can we re-open this against Gnome Terminal, if that's the only terminal (i.e. all Ubuntu users, for starters!) that has this problem?

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/502888

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

per suggestion in above, raised upstream to gnome-terminal
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606064

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

re-reading this, and just thinking from a basic usability point of view, blue and green are very close together in visual terms - the most common form of colour-blindness is blue/green, which makes them much harder to distinguish for a lot of people.

Could you consider picking a pair of colours which are less ambiguous, contrast-wise? It must have been an arbitrary decision by someone at some point to use that pair of colours... with the benefit of more awareness of the needs of people with visual impairment, could we not change it to a "better" pair, with higher contrast between them?
Maybe remove the background stripe?
Maybe a pair of colours which are "complimentary", e.g. blue on yellow?

I am struggling to understand the reluctance to do anything about this - could you help me understand this, please?

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

just so we're all on the same page - this is how it looks on my computer.

I believe I have correct colour vision - and I can barely make out the word "test" on this image at its normal size (as it opens).

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

this is the same test, using konsole. It's a bit more readable than the gnome-terminal example (hance the observation that gnome-terminal has a colour rendering problem (bug raised)), but it's still quite hard to read, compared to all the other colours that are normally seen on a text screen.

[Andy Stanford-Clark (andysc)]

oops, sorry that wasn't a fair comparison - different directory name!