Random variation of background colour/hue

[jn64]

This is one feature I miss from xfce4-terminal.
https://docs.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/preferences#%20Vary%20the%20background%20color%20for%20each%20tab

Vary the background color for each tab

Choose a random color based on the selected background color.
The Hue value will be randomly chosen. Saturation will be random as well,
clamped +/- 20% of the original value. The Value won't be modified,
to make sure the new color will have the same brightness.

Slight variation in hue helps to differentiate ad-hoc terminals.

Related but not the same, as these are about setting
specific colour/theme in specific conditions:

• How to change background/font color with prompt (or by hostname?) #4788
• Setting the current surface's theme #3457

[pluiedev]

Definitely either #2353 territory or something that should be controlled by escape codes. To my knowledge no other terminal does this and we tend to be conservative with appearance customization settings that don't show a clear benefit to most people (not to say that this idea is not valuable, but you're the first person so far to propose something like this).

[00-kat]

should be controlled by escape codes

If you want to do this, you could put something like what is described in #3457 (comment) in your shell rc. HSV ↔ RGB is fairly straightforward so you could do it all in shell if you wanted to, or you could make a little script in, say, Python, to do it.

[jn64]

you could put something like what is described in
#3457 (comment)
in your shell rc

Yes I could. I'm still making a feature request because IMO it's a useful
feature for a terminal that boasts about being feature-rich.

Ghostty is a very feature-rich terminal.
[...]
Features for end-users are things like multi-window, tabs, splits, ligatures,
auto-update, etc. These are features that make using a terminal more
pleasant without requiring any changes to the running terminal applications
(such as your shell, text editor, etc.).

— https://ghostty.org/docs/features

---

Now it's fine if the feature is rejected for any or no reason,
but this is just silly:

To my knowledge no other terminal does this

xfce4-terminal.

we tend to be conservative with appearance customization settings
that don't show a clear benefit to most people

Custom shaders, platform-specific settings for titlebar transparency…?

but you're the first person so far to propose something like this

All features are first proposed by the first person to propose it.

But I can take a hint. Thanks for your time.

[00-kat]

feature-rich

There is a difference between “feature-rich” and “every niche feature ever requested, even if no one (except perhaps the original requester) ends up using them”. Especially if said niche features could be implemented by something more general like #2353, or with existing tried and tested escape sequences.

To my knowledge no other terminal does this

xfce4-terminal.

I believe @pluiedev meant “To my knowledge, no terminal other than xfce4-terminal does this” because of the presence of the word “other” along with “does” there.

(No comments on the other two points.)

[pluiedev]

To put it even more bluntly, we don't have an obligation to implement everything everyone has ever requested. iTerm2 has a feature where you can select a variety of text objects with quadruple left mouse clicks, ranging from Objective-C selectors to Java annotations. Just because iTerm2 has it, does it mean we are somehow not feature rich if we refuse to implement it because it's such a niche feature that only iTerm2 has?

I'll leave the thinking to yourself.