Ah, I see. Still, Ctrl-K + X ? I'd rather remember numbers than letters for colors. But, yes, that does add many more than 10 colors and actually does offer the fewest extra bytes needed in a message while allowing for a very large number of colors. It does, however, break all scripts that use Ctrl-K by itself to go back to default color unless it has a space after it. So it has pros and cons.
Even though the brackets were meant for optional, he was still saying there had to be an ending character of some sort. I suppose that isn't necessarily bad, but it's not great either. And, not only does it break scripts than use Ctrl-K by itself, but it would break every script that uses colors because none would have that ending character.
In the end, like you, I think the current system works fine. I'm sure there may have been better ways of handling it originally, but I don't think there are any better ways now because most ways that would be considered better would break too many scripts. So the best way to handle it would be to use the current system and make use of colors 16-99, which shouldn't break any scripts and is compatible with most other clients that are already compatible with the mIRC system.
The only other options I can think of if we wanted to go to a new system would be to have some non-printing code (even if it's just a set of 4 Ctrl-B/U/I/O/K characters like BBBB or BBUU or whatever that won't show or affect text) that can be added at the beginning of a line telling mIRC to use the new system and if it's not there, mIRC uses the old system.
Or mIRC adds a script conversion "button" that will convert the current format to a new format so users can update any scripts they use even if the author no longer supports it. I doubt an automatic converter would work all that great, though.
I suppose we *could* also add a new Ctrl code for "advanced colors", but that wouldn't be supported by any other clients or older versions of mIRC and wouldn't show up properly.
So, in the end, only the current method with 00-99 is "safe" to use for colors. And I think 100 colors is plenty. With that many, I think we'll end up with a lot of color spammers as it is. Even so, I'd like to see more colors for messages sent over the server and an RGB option (preferably with color wheel) for local text. I'd like a color wheel for use with /drawtext as well... maybe as a button at the top of the script editor and in mIRC's toolbar that pops it up and inserts the RGB values at the cursor.
