The default config.json has:

            "DarkBackground": {
                "Trace": "DarkGray",
                "Debug": "DarkGray",
                "Info": "White",
                "Warn": "Yellow",
                "Error": "Red",
                "Alert": "Magenta",
                "Success": "DarkGreen"
            },

Which looks like this on Ubuntu 18.04:

It should probably be changed to:

            "DarkBackground": {
                "Trace": "Gray",
                "Debug": "Gray",
                "Info": "White",
                "Warn": "Yellow",
                "Error": "Red",
                "Alert": "Magenta",
                "Success": "Green"
            },

Which looks like this:

It's hard to support all platforms with the default colors. The dark background on Windows is black, instead of the mid-range purple Ubuntu opted for. The proposed color scheme also makes Trace/Debug/Info almost indistinguishable, which defeats one of the main purposes (deemphasizing less important messages).

To make matters worse, we can't just have per-OS color schemes since it also depends on which particular terminal you have and its settings.

I understand what you're saying. If I change those defaults I expect to mess color settings in SMAPI as well as anything else using the terminal, because I did something special.

So maybe I can come at this a different way. That config file is replaced each time I install SMAPI right? Would it be reasonable to have a file in my local user space that would define the colors? That way the installer would just know and I don't need to mess with the settings every time I upgrade.

Thank you! This will make my life better!

Thanks for the suggestion! The upcoming SMAPI 3.2 will now let you override settings in a separate smapi-internal/config.user.json file.