Improve username color distribution about matterhorn HOT 7 CLOSED

One idea I had that would basically just reduce the chances of collision would be to detect when the terminal supports 256 colors and use a larger palette.

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Right now we use Hashable's hash function to index into the color list. If we can come up with other deterministic choice functions then that will work well.

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I'm closing this, primarily because we haven't gotten any support requests to fix this, but also because aside from using 256 color support, I'm not sure there's much we can do about this. (I'm also not confident that the proposed heuristics will improve the distribution in a way that would be obviously different from how it is now.)

If anyone has ideas on how to make this better, let's start with a candidate patch and go from there.

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As you were looking for feedback, I'd love 256 color support! I run TERM='screen-256color' for my IRC clients for just this reason. The UI is fine, but for names, it's nice to have a wider distribution, as you hit 8 in a channel talking way too easily. I realize that adding a "me too" on the end of this isn't super helpful, but this is exactly the solution in other clients I've used when this problem is hit.

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I've started working on 256-color support for username color assignment on a branch:

https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn/tree/feature/username-colors-256

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From a discussion with @kquick, one of the things we need to do on this branch now is to prune colors that are too dark for the dark built-in theme and too light for the light built-in theme.

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As of 6f3b8e3, this has now been resolved on develop. The primary changes are:

• New built-in color themes, builtin:dark256 and builtin:light256, which offer 256-color username colors but are otherwise identical to the light and dark built-in themes, and
• A command /username-attribute that can be used to determine which attribute name Matterhorn uses to render a given username, in case users want to override that color choice.

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