My small wish for terminal programs (and other programs)

Over on the Fediverse I expressed a grump and a wish:

This is my face about how absurdly difficult it is to set up a light theme in <name your favorite modern terminal program>. No, I do not want to play hunt the wumpus to find all of your colour settings, I want a "I want black text on white background" option. Your dark theme default is searing my eyes out, thanks.

For some reason the modern default for terminal programs seems to have become bright text on a dark background (although it's not always pure white on pure black). Some terminal programs may be picking this up from some system theme setting that in my eccentric desktop isn't necessarily correctly set, but I believe that others are doing it entirely on their own.

Approximately none of these programs have a simple setting to invert themselves to a light theme. Instead, you get to go through all of their colour settings trying to set them correctly. It's often not as simple as foreground and background, because you also have to change cursor colour and cursor text colour and other yak shaving. My experience so far is that different terminal programs have different collections of settings and the interactions of what I need to set aren't always clear, making it more frustrating.

(And then there's whatever configuration system that the particular terminal program uses, which isn't always straightforward or easy to follow in their documentation or whatever. I'm especially irritated by the lack of documentation, because I'd like to think "how do I set up a light theme" is an obvious FAQ entry, or ideally a single configuration option.)

This isn't just an issue of preferences. Some people, me included, find reading white text on a dark background far more difficult than the reverse. A terminal program that insists on a dark theme is basically unusable until I fix it; at most I can do quick tests in the program. Of course this issue isn't restricted to terminal programs, since a lot of people seem to like 'dark mode' websites as well and those are more or less as unreadable to me (and others). If I'm lucky, the website has a toggle that I can find, but more often than not my reaction is to close the browser window (or reach for Firefox's reader mode if I think the page is interesting enough).

(I could possibly make this situation slightly better by working out all of the colours once, in advance, so I can have all of them ready to plug in to a new program. But the easier approach is to not bother trying new terminal programs and stick with the ones I have, even if I'm not completely happy with gnome-terminal and would like a better alternative.)

PS: I've now potentially made the situation a bit better by doing 'gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-light', where it previously was "default". But who knows how many terminal or other programs this will affect.