COLOR command – some observations

[whathim]

I love the vDos COLOR command and am making good use of it - please don’t remove it from future vDos versions. I hope the following observations are of interest/help to other users and trust Jos will correct any misunderstandings I have.



My Open text editor, running in vDos, supports the use of the full palette of 16 colors (the 8 normal colors and the 8 high-intensity colors) for both foreground and background. This is possible because blinking text is disabled (I believe this automatically applies in vDos – please correct me if wrong, Jos).



I’m setting the colors for my editor in a batch file (reproduced below) that I call from Autoexec.txt.


@echo off
REM Set Palette colors to RGB values using vDos's COLOR command.
REM


COLOR 0 000000     %= 0,0,0        Black (original is off-black)

COLOR 1 000064     %= 0,0,100      Blue-black

COLOR 2 C8FFC8     %= 200,255,200  Pastel green

COLOR 3 C8FFFF     %= 200,255,255  Pastel cyan - Default paper

COLOR 4 FF0000     %= 255,0,0      Red - Error message paper

COLOR 5 FFC8C8     %= 255,200,200  Pastel red

COLOR 6 FFFFC8     %= 255,255,200  Pastel yellow



COLOR a C8FFE6     %= 200,255,230  Pastel cyan-green

COLOR b C8C8FF     %= 200,200,255  Pastel blue

COLOR c FFE6C8     %= 255,230,200  Pastel orange

COLOR d FFC8FF     %= 255,200,255  Pastel purple

COLOR e E6FFE6     %= 230,255,230  Pastel olive



rem COLOR B C8C8FF   %= Doesn't work - color number must be lowercase digit

rem

rem COLOR 02 C8FFC8  %= Doesn't work - color number must be single digit

rem

rem COLOR b c8c8ff   %= Works - RGB value can be lowercase or uppercase
The vDos COLOR command is documented in Readme.pdf as follows:



COLOR Select a theme (T0-9), or set a color attribute, back-, foreground or both to a RGB value. COLOR [T0-9] [h [FG|BG] hhhhhh] (For instance COLOR T3, or COLOR 7 BG a09090).



The syntax I’m interested in for this post is:



  COLOR h [FG|BG] hhhhhh



Initially, I had some confusion figuring out what this command was doing. I think the documentation could usefully be expanded:



  COLOR h FG hhhhhh - maps color number h, where it’s used as foreground, to RGB value hhhhhh



  COLOR h BG hhhhhh - maps color number h, where it’s used as background, to RGB value hhhhhh



  COLOR h hhhhhh - maps color number h, where it’s used as foreground or background, to RGB value hhhhhh



The other observations I have are apparent from the comments in the above batch file. Summarizing, they are:



The color number, “h”, is a lowercase hex digit (0,1,2,…f). The COLOR command does not work if an uppercase digit, “B” for example, is used.



The RGB value, “hhhhhh”, is a concatenation of three two-digit hex numbers for the red, green and blue component values. Conversely to the color number, this RGB value can be lowercase or uppercase.



Finally, FWIW, here are screen shots of the color menus from my Open editor before and after applying the above batch file.

[Jos]

vDos indeed doesn't do blinking (I hate that).

You will be one of the few actually using the COLOR command. It’s the first feedback.

I replaced the COLORS= directive in config.txt by THEME= in the 2020 version. The first proofed to be too complicated for most users, while the simplified second even introduced a dark theme mode.

The color index option is indeed lower case only. I noticed this after the 2023 release.

The COLOR command is more versatile than the COLOR= config.txt directive once. Select a theme, set background colors only, or adjust a predefined THEME (at runtime).

Documentation of the COLOR command could perhaps be more clear. Or come with more examples…

Jos

[whathim]

Yes, I was already aware that the COLOR command applies at runtime and I’ve played with dynamically adjusting colors from within the OBF (Open Batch Files) that I use to run third-party programs, like compilers – perhaps changing source code text color to reflect the outcome of the compile, or some such. So far, however, it remains a “cool” idea in search of a problem to solve.