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An interface or layout that has too many bright colors, often hideously contrasting for maximum eyestrain. Prevalent in MacOS and recently Windows XP that have extremely colorful menus and buttons. The term "angry fruit salad" refers to the fact that canned fruit salad often looked unnaturally colorful, almost neonlike. The sight of such a color jumble was then referred to as an angry fruit salad.
I don't like the iMac's OS...too much angry fruit salad.
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a gui that has too damn many bright colours
bill: bah look at that gui it looks like angry fruit salad
pill: ya its 2 colorful
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This term was coined when color terminals/monitors (especially on PCs running MS-DOS) were becoming more pervasive. Common systems allowed for a fixed palette of 16 colors with a very high saturation. When software started to use the colors (and ANSI.SYS became a thing) the common focus was to give all different elements a different color. (This notion is maintaned today by Emacs' font-lock-mode and other syntax highlighting variants.) The result was a wild mix of red, green yellow, white, black and blue - almost like in a fruit salad - that might easily hurt your eyes .
While the very first versions of Windows sufferd the same issues with the palette , GUIs in general don't expose the same problem and don't put too many high-contrast-colors all over the screen.
"Wow! This Midnight Commander theme is some piece of angry fruit salad."
"Let's avoid angry-fruit-salad-syndrome and use the solarized syntax highlighting theme."