Thursday 7 February 2013

(XFCE) Terminal and XChat Colour Scheme

I'm a regular terminal user and with F18 I switched back from Sakura to XFCE Terminal, because for some reason sakura refused to get configured as before (I think I wasn't able to remove window borders anymore)—I prefer terminal in some kind of semi-full-screen mode, i.e. maximized (but with DE panel[s] still visible), without menu, without window borders, without scrollbars. And while I was at the configuring, I decided to change the default colour scheme. It's not like I particularly dislike it, but as a regular mc (midnight-commander—there isn't a better file manager out there) user, I kinda grew to dislike the blueness of the default blue and some kind of colour combinations weren't exactly easy to read (hinted fonts are partially to blame for that though, by design). So first I searched a bit over the net, but didn't find anything satisfactory, so I decided to adapt Echo Icon Theme Palette for terminal use (black terminal, I've also prepared a bright/inverse version for xchat). First how it looks:

And now for the actual colours. Here's an excerpt from ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc:

BackgroundMode=TERMINAL_BACKGROUND_TRANSPARENT
BackgroundDarkness=0.950000
ColorPalette1=#000000000000
ColorPalette2=#b4b400000000
ColorPalette3=#0000aaaa0000
ColorPalette4=#cbcb7c7c0000
ColorPalette5=#00003f3f6868
ColorPalette6=#bfbf0000efef
ColorPalette7=#0000a61dd074
ColorPalette8=#c6c6c6c6c6c6
ColorPalette9=#5ef75ef75ef7
ColorPalette10=#ffff52990000
ColorPalette11=#9393dada0000
ColorPalette12=#ffffe1e13939
ColorPalette13=#00007373a2a2
ColorPalette14=#dbdb8181ffff
ColorPalette15=#8181e3e3ffff
ColorPalette16=#ffffffffffff
ColorForeground=#c6c6c6c6c6c6
ColorCursor=#c6c6c6c6c6c6
TabActivityColor=#00003f3f6868
ScrollingSingleLine=FALSE

You can notice I also included ScrollingSingleLine=FALSE—that makes shift+arrows work in mc to select items ;-)

And now from ~/.xchat2/colors.conf

color_0 = 0000 0000 0000
color_1 = ffff ffff ffff
color_2 = 5050 d8d8 ffff
color_3 = 5b5b b5b5 0000
color_4 = ecec 2828 0000
color_5 = d7d7 a1a1 3c3c
color_6 = d4d4 6767 ffff
color_7 = b4b4 0000 0000
color_8 = 6666 3c3c 0000
color_9 = 0606 9090 0000
color_10 = 0000 7373 a2a2
color_11 = 0000 3f3f 6868
color_12 = 0000 adad dbdb
color_13 = bfbf 0000 efef
color_14 = 5e5e 5e5e 5e5e
color_15 = 3030 3030 3030
color_16 = 0000 0000 0000
color_17 = ffff ffff ffff
color_18 = 5050 d8d8 ffff
color_19 = 5b5b b5b5 0000
color_20 = ecec 2828 0000
color_21 = d7d7 a1a1 3c3c
color_22 = d4d4 6767 ffff
color_23 = b4b4 0000 0000
color_24 = 6666 3c3c 0000
color_25 = 0606 9090 0000
color_26 = 0000 7373 a2a2
color_27 = 0000 3f3f 6868
color_28 = 0000 adad dbdb
color_29 = bfbf 0000 efef
color_30 = 5e5e 5e5e 5e5e
color_31 = 3030 3030 3030
color_256 = ffff ffff ffff
color_257 = 0000 7373 a2a2
color_258 = 0000 0000 0000
color_259 = ffff ffff ffff
color_260 = cccc 1010 1010
color_261 = 0606 9090 0000
color_262 = 0000 7373 a2a2
color_263 = 5b5b b5b5 0000
color_264 = 5e5e 5e5e 5e5e

Hope it's useful to other people than me as well. I find it both easier on eyes, and having better readability (with the font I'm using, it seems this one is important too).

PS: For those wondering about some differences of my desktop compared to previous screenshots—when trying out CentOS 6, I got addicted to analog clock ;-) And a little while before I decided to hide the bottom panel automagically to have more space for apps.

PPS: My apologies for having some comments in my moderation queue for too long, somehow I wasn't notified via mail, or missed them. I definitely don't censor, the moderation is for spam purposes only (or for cases were people post the same reaction multiple times).

Update (2013/08/08): In Fedora 19 (and newer), the xfce terminal config is in different place and colours are specified slightly different. Here's excerpt from ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc:

ColorPalette=#000000;#b40000;#00aa00;#cb7c00;#003f68;#bf00ef;#00a6d0;#c6c6c6;#5e5e5e;#ff5200;#93da00;#ffe139;#0073a2;#db81ff;#81e3ff;#ffffff
ColorCursor=#c6c6c6c6c6c6
TabActivityColor=#00003f3f6868
ColorForeground=#c6c6c6c6c6c6

2 comments:

Kris said...

Nice to see two of the icons I made a long time ago in the top panel ;)

Great post!

Unknown said...

Thanks VERY much for this post. Aside from the cool color scheme, it helped me a great deal because I needed the shift+arrow keys for marking text in mc, which your config allows.