One Thing Well

Colours

Reader Bruno got in touch to ask about my terminal colours, so I thought I’d go into far too much detail on the offchance anyone else is interested!

In xterm on Linux or OS X, I use the lovely Inconsolata font and some muted shades I found on the web somewhere many years ago:

The relevant section of my ~/.Xdefaults looks like this:

! Colours
*background: rgb:F5/F5/F5
*foreground: rgb:44/44/44
*color0:  rgb:00/00/00
*color1:  rgb:9e/18/28
*color2:  rgb:5c/b2/47
*color3:  rgb:96/8a/38
*color4:  rgb:41/61/a0
*color5:  rgb:9b/76/8e
*color6:  rgb:41/91/89
*color7:  rgb:ee/ea/ea
*color8:  rgb:66/66/66
*color9:  rgb:cf/61/71
*color10: rgb:c5/a7/79
*color11: rgb:ff/f7/96
*color12: rgb:41/86/be
*color13: rgb:cf/9e/be
*color14: rgb:71/be/be
*color15: rgb:dd/dd/dd

If I’m in a TTY I use some colours stolen from jwr’s informative post, Vim colours in the console and the Terminus font:

These are set in my ~/.zshrc, like so:

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    echo -en "\e]P0000000" #black
    echo -en "\e]P83d3d3d" #darkgrey
    echo -en "\e]P18c4665" #darkred
    echo -en "\e]P9bf4d80" #red
    echo -en "\e]P2287373" #darkgreen
    echo -en "\e]PA53a6a6" #green
    echo -en "\e]P37c7c99" #brown
    echo -en "\e]PB9e9ecb" #yellow
    echo -en "\e]P4395573" #darkblue
    echo -en "\e]PC477ab3" #blue
    echo -en "\e]P55e468c" #darkmagenta
    echo -en "\e]PD7e62b3" #magenta
    echo -en "\e]P631658c" #darkcyan
    echo -en "\e]PE6096bf" #cyan
    echo -en "\e]P7899ca1" #lightgrey
    echo -en "\e]PFc0c0c0" #white
    clear
fi

Finally, in iTerm, I go with the rather more dayglo ‘Light Background’ defaults: