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What's new in 2026.8.5

A release about names, about what a program says out loud, and about the color it says it in. The break is the sweep of renames — Migrating to 2026.8.5 lists every one, and the changelog is the full record.

The console is caught​

A line written to standard output lands on the frame and scrolls it away, and the frame is drawn as the difference from the last one, so nothing tells the drawing that the screen has moved: some runs came up clean, some came up three lines out of place and stayed that way. The host's own Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime did it, and so did a stray Console.WriteLine from any library that never knew it was in a terminal application.

AddArlecchino now stands in front of standard output and standard error. While a frame is on the screen, what is written there is logged under stdout or stderr and shown in the log overlay with escape sequences taken out of it. Before the terminal is taken and after it is given back, the console works as it always did, so --help, a startup failure and the shutdown lines still print.

One habit changes with it: builder.Logging.ClearProviders() used to be how a console provider was kept off the frame, and is now how an application ends up with an empty overlay. Arlecchino registers no logging provider of its own — the overlay draws what a provider writes to the console, and the default host already has one.

A palette for the terminal you landed on​

A palette is written against a background nobody promised. ArlecchinoOptions.PaletteForBackground is handed the color the terminal turned out to be and answers with the palette to wear:

builder.Services.AddArlecchino(options =>
    options.PaletteForBackground = background => new ThemePalette
    {
        Secondary = new RgbTermColor { Foreground = Shade.Against(background, hue: 25, chroma: 0.02, contrast: 3) },
        Selection = new RgbTermColor { Background = Shade.Lifted(background, 0.06) },
    });

Behind it are Oklch, Contrast and Shade: the space where lightness, chroma and hue come apart, the ratio the accessibility guidelines are written in, and the solver that finds the color reaching a wanted contrast against a given background. Two of the numbers are worth knowing — the turn from a dark theme to a light one is at luminance 0.179, not at the half-way gray, and a background near the middle can only reach about 5:1 in either direction, which is what Shade.Scaled brings a ladder down to. See Working a color out against the background.

It runs once, as the application starts and the terminal is asked what color it is. A terminal that will not say leaves Theme exactly as it was given.

Names that say what a thing is​

Selected for an index, Muted for a color, Since for a moment: a name that says what was done to a thing rather than what it is costs a release to correct, so they were corrected together — SelectedIndex, Secondary, RaisedAt, and a dozen more. Every one of them is a rename the compiler names for you.

Two smaller fixes​

Ctrl+Shift+C copies on Windows instead of stopping the application: the console used to decide for itself which of it and Ctrl+C had been pressed, and now the application is handed the key rather than the verdict. And a copy no longer goes nowhere in a terminal with OSC 52 switched off — the text also goes down the standard input of the first clipboard program the machine has. Both are on Escape sequences.