Why is the background in "black on white" quite a dark grey?

[halloleo]

I experiment with custom colours. First thing I tried is just:

options.color_default      = 'black on white'  # the default fg and bg colors

but the result in iTerm for macOS is a darker grey background not a white or something similar´

Apple's default Terminal app doesn't look much different:

I know colors in terminal windows are a complicated matter, because of all the mapping which happens. So my question is:

Is this only me? Do I have somewhere in my terminal programs set some custom mappings which chance white to grey? Or is this a Visidata thing?

Any pointers are appreciated!

[saulpw]

@halloleo curses maps white to color 7, and that specific color would be set in your terminal theme. You could change it there, or use a more specific color like 15 (for the brightest white) or any of the lighter grayscales from 250 to 255. Try the open-colors command and you can see the full list of available colors.

[halloleo]

Great. This is excellent! "black on 254" does a great jobs.