Duplicate #13446

@Carreau The issue you linked to has been locked. Are there any documented workarounds for this? The conversation in the linked issue talks about perhaps using bold, underlined text rather than a background color, but don't include instructions.

This still appears to be an issue in iPython 8.4:

(Alacritty with Duskfox theme)

There is a temp fix suggested here that works for me; https://stackoverflow.com/a/74681224

Still experiencing this in ipython 8.11.0, I have to use the workaround described in the above comment

I have a command that opens a new terminal and executes the following code.

from IPython.core import ultratb;ultratb.VerboseTB._tb_highlight = 'bg:ansired';

The output looks like this.

The color of strings is also on the brink of being unreadable, an improvement on it would also be welcome.

You can also create an ipython startup script and place it .ipyhon/profile_default/startup/001.py. I'm not sure if the name of the file matters, but that was how I saw in some docs.

# 001.py
import IPython
from IPython.core import ultratb

ultratb.VerboseTB._tb_highlight = 'bg:ansired'

ipython = IPython.get_ipython()
if ipython is not None:
    ipython_version = IPython.__version__
    major_version = int(ipython_version.split('.')[0])
    minor_version = int(ipython_version.split('.')[1])

    if major_version < 8 or (major_version == 8 and minor_version < 1):
        ipython.magic("load_ext autoreload")
        ipython.magic("autoreload 2")
    else:
        ipython.run_line_magic(magic_name="load_ext", line="autoreload")
        ipython.run_line_magic(magic_name="autoreload", line="2")

    print("Autoreload enabled.")
else:
    print("Autoreload not enabled.")

IPython.version_info will give you a pre-parsed version tuple. And in general you can completely customise colors. It's impossible to get defaults that are readable everywhere.