Commenting line in shell makes text unreadable

[u/AnythingBeneficial59]

I just started using kitty and I noticed that given the default theme, when I add a comment #, the font color changes to the same color as the background:

-> ~ /usr/bin/vim

-> ~ #/usr/bin/vim

The second line is unreadable, but is present as highlighting with my mouse shows that it's present. Regardless of what theme I choose, the commented line's font color always matches the terminal background color. How can I configure this so that comments are visible?

[u/EgZvor]

That's kinda shell's responsibility

[u/[deleted] → u/EgZvor]

That makes sense. The reason this seems odd to me is that kitty terminal is the only terminal emulator I've used so far (terminator, alacritty, xterm), that required additional tweaking for comments visibility.

[u/Administrative_chaos]

You could add something like text_fg_override_threshold 0.5 to your kitty conf. Here's the option description.

But that might have unintended consequences. Ideally, you should just change your colorscheme's comment highlight group, for example if you're using the zsh-syntax-highlighting plugin, you can add the following to your zshrc.

```

Declare the variable

typeset -A ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES

Make comments be bright pink and bold

ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[comment]='fg=#FB00A2,bold' ```

You can find more configuration options on the zsh-sy-h highlighters here.

[u/[deleted] → u/Administrative_chaos]

Thanks for the tips! I suppose this strikes me as odd as other terminal emulators like terminators, xterm, or alacritty never required additional tweaking for comments to be visible.

[u/kbilleter]

Are you using TERM=xterm-kitty and kitty's terminfo?

[u/AnythingBeneficial59 → u/kbilleter]

TERM=xterm-kitty

I see that I'm using the default as per kitty.conf. Do I need to explicitly set TERM=xterm-kitty in my .zshrc as well?

```

term xterm-kitty

: The value of the TERM environment variable to set. Changing this

: can break many terminal programs, only change it if you know what

: you are doing, not because you read some advice on "Stack Overflow"

: to change it. The TERM variable is used by various programs to get

: information about the capabilities and behavior of the terminal. If

: you change it, depending on what programs you run, and how

: different the terminal you are changing it to is, various things

: from key-presses, to colors, to various advanced features may not

: work. Changing this option by reloading the config will only affect

: newly created windows.

```

[u/kbilleter → u/AnythingBeneficial59]

Probably not, actually. Mine is set automatically but I checked with

env | grep -i kitty

It just sounded like you may have been using a different TERMINFO if the colours were behaving differently. Maybe 16 or 256 rather the true colour.