Forums Feature Suggestions Colour codes revamp (with backwards compatibility)

mIRC currently has sixteen colours, going from 0 to 15, taking up two characters. My suggestion is to introduce 6-bit colour.

A 6-bit RGB palette has 64 colours. I say we take numbers 20 through 83 and map them to these 64 colours.

My guess is there might be IRC clients which map numbers 16-99 to the original sixteen colours currently. So, for the purpose of backwards compatibility, I say with numbers 20 through 83, we map the respective shades (as close as possible) in an order most fitting. For example, since red is 4, then 20, 36, 52, and 68 would be shades of red from that 6-bit RGB palette.

Just as a note if you want to look up other comments on this idea, it's been suggested many times and a search in this feature suggestions forum should show you what others think. Ideas range from no changes, to 64 colors, to using RGB values so you can have just about any color you want.

My mistake. I only searched one year back. But even when searching five years, I'm having difficulty finding anything mentioning 64 colours or 6-bit colours. Maybe I'm searching the wrong terms.

But, specifically, my idea is 6-bit colours, but with backwards compatibility.

try using colors rather than colours in the search term.

While colours is the correct spelling for Canadian and British English, American English uses colors

(American's are notoriously lazy for things like that)

We're not notoriously lazy but notoriously conscious of saving time.

Doomstars, I wasn't saying it was a mistake for not looking. I was just letting you know if you wanted to check up on other conversations about it while waiting for people to reply here.



I consider it more of a written accent. Colours and Colors aren't really pronounced the same... close, but not quite. Now, theater versus theatre... that's just people trying to be "fancy" with how they write it.

I resemble that remark!

I meant that when I searched, I only searched one year back. I believe I used both spellings of colour when searching, just the wrong duration back in time.

But, I'm an American. And I think it was only recently I've learned I should spell practice, the verb, as practise.

Heh. Just because other countries distinguish between the noun and verb doesn't mean we have to in the US. Using practise in the US is likely to make someone think you can't spell as a relatively small number of Americans are likely to know that practise is used for the verb in certain other countries. Also note that I talk to people all over the world on a regular basis and I can't say that I've ever actually seen anyone use practise.

If you do what some of the others suggest and search back for other discussions on the addition of extra colours in mIRC you will probably notice that I was one of those who asked for this. I think I suggested 256 or more at the time (many years ago now) but at the end of the day I am not really fussy about the exact number. I think any additional colours would be good.

Some people have suggested in reply that you can in fact choose from the whole 32 bit colour range and that is quite true however my point was (and still is) that you can only have a choice of 16 colours concurrently, aside from features added since then, like coloured borders between the nicklist and chat window, and the marker line.

The most logical way to add support for extra colours seems to be to support an RGB value in the /echo -c switch.

Also, the options dialog could have an extra button on there to allow you to choose a colour that isn't in the palette. < I expect this would require more work.

6-bit RGB is a regular colour palette which provides 64 colours. Having a two number colour code limits us to 100 (00 through 99) possibilities. Keeping the first sixteen the same, we could still add 64. Whether the original 16 would be in those 64, who knows? But, we could map those 64 colours accordingly, and in such a way that clients which already map those colours to the original 16, will be matched close enough.