While it's great that Terminal now has built-in support for changing the ANSI colors, I find it annoying that it automatically adjusts the colors to improve contrast, which means the colors that I actually pick often end up washed out or off in some other way. Here's a screenshot explaining the problem:
This bugs me because I like to use the same color scheme in Terminal and MacVim, and with this handling of colors by Terminal, they don't match up to the ones in MacVim.
Does anyone know of a solution to this, besides switching to iTerm 2 (which I'd rather not – I like the rest of Terminal, especially some GUI touches like the pulsating visual bell). Thanks!
Best Answer
Here's the trick that you need to know: Values set via RGB get mangled, those set via HSB do not.
I had a similar problem using the (great) Solarized color scheme: MacVim had a darker (and correct) background color than Terminal, even though I was setting all of the correct RGB values per the Solarized spec. See here:
Basically you need to know what your color values are supposed to be for each of the Terminal ANSI, text, and Background (note this one is on the Window tab) colors and then set them via the HSB picker instead of RGB. See this example:
For whatever reason (I suspect some type of profile thing, or perhaps a contrast tweak as you suggest), the RGB color you enter is not what you get. You'll also notice that once you've set the values via HSB, switching to the RGB picker will show options different than you'd expect. The Solarized value conversions all agree according to Photoshop; it seems to be something that the Apple color picker is doing for you.