Support 0xRRGGBB colors on Write-Host

Summary of the new feature / enhancement

As a user I want Write-Host to support specifying full RGB colors on the -Foreground and -Background parameters.

I would also like to be able to specify any of the X11 named colors by name

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

Instead of needing to write $($PSStyle.Foreground.FromRgb(0xa020f0)) into the string to set a purple color, I want to specify -Foreground A020F0 or -Foreground 0xa020f0 or -Foreground Purple

[Jaykul]

• Should we consider using the Web color names instead of X11 as some of them aren’t the same and is more modern?

Definitely NOT. 😉

For three reasons:

1. This is the terminal. We are older than the web, and we aim to be compatible with xterm, not mosaic.
2. The web colors change some of the common names that are part of the existing 16 colors. E.g. cyan became aqua, magenta became fuchsia…
3. The web colors are sRGB color-space specific, and you don’t have that luxury 😉

[jhoneill]

@Jaykul FWIW I never said that all use of colour is bad.

However. We teach programmers that the job of programs is to print text on the console (e.g. Hello, World), and even when the programming task is scripting, not systems programming there is still a desire to print WAY too much : - one recent issue is to print the time to process the profile less often: I can judge fast enough or too slow, without knowing to the millisecond how long it took, I’m no more informed by the message being there , so why is it shown by default. Way too much that is printed (like the long hashes in your example) is nothing but chaff that the poor user needs to wade through.

The felony is compounded by Programmers who - with no particular skills in UI design being brought to bear on the problem - decide that we’d like our headings in green, or Zip files picked out in red or some such (or for an example on a recent issue, an external executable prints file names in dark magenta - a problem for Windows PowerShell on the default windows host).
It’s not always bad: git helps me see changes by using of colour, but in the colours git log are just what devs thought was a good idea at the time. Picking out warnings and errors is good, and what you’ve shown basically has two classes of “recede into the background” and one class of “Pay attention to this”. We’re better off with that. But the devs let lose with crayons kind of colouring in is something we should be spared.