ANSI colors for first 16 IRC colors?

[jwodder]

The "Colors" section of the "IRC Formatting" page lists recommended ANSI color codes for IRC colors 16 through 98 but not for colors 0 through 15, and I'm not 100% sure what ANSI colors the latter should map to.

Assuming the first 16 IRC colors should map to the first 16 ANSI colors, the most obvious mappings are:

IRC	ANSI
White (0)	Bright White (15)
Black (1)	Black (0)
Blue (2)	Blue (4)
Green (3)	Green (2)
Red (4)	Red (1) 1
Brown (5)	???
Magenta (6)	Magenta (5)
Orange (7)	???
Yellow (8)	Bright Yellow (11) 1
Light Green (9)	Bright Green (10)
Cyan (10)	Cyan (6)
Light Cyan (11)	Bright Cyan (14)
Light Blue (12)	Bright Blue (12)
Pink (13)	Bright Magenta (13) 1
Grey (14)	Bright Black (8) 1
Light Grey (15)	White (7) 1

This leaves the ANSI colors yellow (3) and bright red (9) unused. My understanding is that ANSI yellow is normally used as a "brown" color, but the colored square shown on the page for IRC brown looks more like ANSI (dark/non-bright) red to me. On top of that, none of the first 16 ANSI colors look like orange (I'd personally pick ANSI 172 for that).

Are there any pre-existing conventions for the ANSI color codes for IRC colors 0-16? Could such a mapping be added to the page?

Footnotes

1. Guess, could be wrong ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

[tommyrot]

The note in the docs adequately sums it up:

NOTE: The colors displayed here are simply a guide. The actual RGB values used for these codes will depend on what the client author has defined, and are often defined by the terminal color scheme for terminal-based clients.

There is no definitive answer. If you are writing a client and you want to be "correct" when displaying colored ascii art, look at what the clients of that time period were doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors
https://www.mirc.com/colors.html
https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html#colors_support
https://github.com/irssi/irssi/blob/master/docs/formats.txt

...

[jwodder]

Interesting. The linked clients all seem to map IRC red (4) to ANSI light/bright red (9) and IRC brown (5) to ANSI (dark) red. Then IRC yellow (8) and orange (7) are presumably ANSI bright yellow (11) and (dark) yellow (3), respectively.

[delthas]

Here is what senpai does: https://git.sr.ht/~delthas/senpai/tree/master/item/ui/style.go#L19