Please add support for themes, allowing us to load a SET of foreground and background colors with a single action
I came across your product while using it in embedded form within RoyalTS. I opened a support ticket with them to ask for this very feature, and that it be setup in their tool so that what I load for use on a Mac with RoyalTSX works and looks the same way in RoyalTS on Windows. They said your product does not support this ability, and they can only leverage what your product supports.
So, I thought I'd suggest this direct to you.
How RoyalTS and you support custom ANSI color themes is not very helpful in enterprise settings. The ability to separately configure each terminal is close to useless, because it allows for each terminal's setting to get out of sync with other settings. What's most important, is to have a SINGLE override which applies to ALL sessions, unless they specifically override, and a way to clear out all such per-session overrides to enforce a global look and feel in a single location.
Additionally, ANSI colors out of the box are cartoonish and garish, as well as very hard to read when presenting via screen share, presenting via projector, or just when working extensively on a terminal many hours per day. I normally use a Mac and use iTerm, within and outside of RoyalTSX, or the Atom editor. Both of these support "themes", and have communities which create a publish themes that allow changing all colors, fonts, etc by selection of a single value, which is then applied across all sessions and documents consistently. I don't have to set each normal and bold foreground or background color separately, at a global level or - god forbid as it is now - on each terminal session when I have to manage HUNDREDS of them. The bulk update feature in RoyalTS is the wrong way to solve this problem, as it continues to allow these sessions to get out of sync, and it gives me no easy way to indicate I don't want that flexibility, but want to make a single theme choice which globally applies - no exceptions. This is easy and what I feel most people I've spoken with want. Please look into http://atom.io and see what I mean by it's themes - having this product's choice of themes would be awesome.
RoyalTS supports importing and using iTerm's themes, but only on a Mac. If you would at least support this interface for creating themes, users could set a single theme value and get the same appearance when accessing the same session from Windows or Mac.
I work for HPE doing AWS Cloud, where I have to share cloud terminal sessions with a team using both Windows and Mac, so cross-platform similar appearance is important to us.
This is valuable feedback, but it’s mostly out-of-scope for us. Third-party applications based on Rebex Terminal Emulation can already offer most of the features described. Please see the comment for detailed response.
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AdminLukas Pokorny (Admin, Rebex) commented
I understand where you are coming from. Global settings for themes would indeed be a great feature to have... in a terminal emulator application.
However, we don't sell such product. Unlike a typical (or advanced) terminal emulator such RoyalTS or PuTTY (which I believe RoyalTS also embeds), Rebex Terminal Emulation along with the UI-less terminal control is a library, which means many aspects of its behavior and presentation are due to choices made by the embedder. For example, it doesn't offer any session management, bulk update or credential storage features because we feel that these are best left to vendors who embed the library in their own applications. If the embedder chooses to provide a global configuration that applies to all sessions (both active and non-active), he is free to do so quite easily - our API already makes this possible without much additional work. To achieve this, their developers just have to maintain a list of active sessions (which they almost certainly already do) and apply the new global settings to each of them in a way that is transparent to the user. And of course, the embedder can decide to offer an entirely different set of ANSI colors and fonts by default out-of-the box - we don't force those cartoonish colors on anyone.
There are some aspects of the terminal control that can't be changed (yet), and I'm not even sure whether the versatility of Atom could ever be achieved (terminal themes would have work with all apps, not just with a single one). Perhaps this is why RoyalTS developers though we would have to add some featurs first. But I am sure that the settings that are already accessible could be used to achieve most of what you described here.
In short, if any of our clients wanted to allow their users to "load a set of foreground and background colors and fonts with a single action and apply those to both active and non-active sessions", they are already free to do so.
And if it turns out that some important theming features cannot be implemented using our current API, we would consider extending it. But you will have to to discuss this with the application vender first. They could then work with us to make this possible.
In any case, thanks for your feedback - if we ever decide to publish a stand-alone terminal emulation app, this will be useful.