Guake terminal displays incorrect colors (insufficient contrast)

I use two dropdown terminals in parallel: Yakuake and Guake.

When using Guake, the colors are way too dark, which makes much of the colored text unreadable because of insufficient contrast. The problem is most severe when displaying color #4 (dark blue) on black background (which is the default color ls displays directories with) or in Midnight Commander (default theme, dark blue background).

Yakuake displays all 16 colors correctly and the text is readable very well, the colored output of ls and Midnight Commander.

My OS is Linux 5.15.11-gentoo with plasma-5.88.0, gtk+-2.24.33 and gtk+-3.24.29. Here is my TERM setting in the environment:

TERM=xterm-256color
COLORTERM=yes

I tried all available Guake themes and all of them have horrible contrast. Either all colors are too dark, or the other way around – all of them are too bright. It seems Guake somehow compresses the color contrast.

I also tried defining custom colors, copying the color settings from Yakuake, but even though I set specific colors explicitly, the actually displayed colors were darker. I validated this with a color picker.

Changing the GTK Theme setting in Guake’s preference tab General did not yield any success either.

The question is: Why does Guake alter the colors? Is there a way to turn this off and let it display the actual colors I specified? The problem must be with Guake or GTK because everything else is identical when using Yakuake (environment, Midnight Commander colors, ls colors, …)

The following screenshots demonstrate my Guake Appearance settings:

And here is some Guake support information:

<details><summary>$ guake --support</summary>
Guake Version:      3.8.0
Vte Version:        0.64.2
Vte Runtime Version:    0.64.2
--------------------------------------------------
GTK+ Version:       3.24.29
GDK Backend:        <GdkX11.X11Display
--------------------------------------------------
Desktop Session: /usr/share/xsessions/plasma
--------------------------------------------------
Display: :0
RGBA visual: True
Composited: True

Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer

It turns out ls renders directories as bold font with the expectation that the text will appear in bright color. As explained by Guake developers this is non-standard behavior used with old terminals that did not supported fonts. Guake follows the ANSI standard and renders the text correctly.

The solution is to tweak the ls colors accordingly.

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Answer