To change the color settings within a running PuTTY session:
- Left click on the top left PuTTY icon (on my system, this looks like two computers with a connection between them.
- Choose "Change Settings". This should bring up a menu with Categories of "Session", "Terminal", "Window", and "Connection". All these should be expanded to show the sub-categories.
- Under the "Window" category, choose "Colours".
You should then see several check box options, and a select box with several items you can set to the values you want. You can click on the "System Colours" option to get the colors pushed down from the server. Otherwise you can select the individual items you want to change and give each one the colors you want.
Edit: As warren pointed out in a comment, if you want the settings you just set up to persist to later connections, go back to the "Sessions" category. You can then select either the "Default settings" or one of the specific sessions you have saved, and click on "Save" to retain those settings.
FWIW: I often save different settings for different sessions so that it's easy to tell them apart when I simultaneously have connections to several different computers open.
From Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop at exactly 35 minutes in:
It's a normalized color histogram across 27 different buckets, and we extract blacks, whites, alpha channels, and grays, and use the most dominant RGBV [sic] value...
I'm fairly certain the speaker meant to say "RGB", since "RGBV" doesn't seem to be a thing. The "normalized" part doesn't really matter; it's effectively counting how many pixels fall into each "bucket." Each pixel, therefore, is put into one of the 27 buckets (arranged in a three-dimensional array; the cube root of 27 is 3) based on the position of each of its channels' value. Windows determines for each color channel whether that color's intensity is in the bottom, middle, or top chunk of the range. It would appear that the ranges are about 0-60, 60-200, and 200-255. Completely transparent pixels are not included at all.
Windows then finds which bucket has the most pixels, ignoring the black, white, and gray ones (the buckets where all three channels were in the same third of the range). That explains the SQL Server Management Studio icon - much of what appears yellow to us actually gets dumped in the "white" bucket and is ignored.
If there are no pixels in any of the acceptable buckets, the program gets a light blue overlay regardless of the system color scheme. (See the command prompt.) If a program has no icon, it gets a white/translucent overlay even though the Windows default icon would otherwise produce a blue or green overlay.
There is nothing to stop multiple programs from having the same highlight color. The newest Chrome icon, for instance, gets the same yellow as Windows 8's Explorer.
If there are ties, there is a predetermined order that does not depend on the order of the colors in the image. This is probably just a result of the way the maximum is found - buckets that are checked earlier will continue to be the max even if a later one ties. It appears that yellow is one of the first buckets checked.
Once the winning bucket is discovered, the highlight color seems to be set to a color somewhere in the middle of the bucket's range.
Test cases (numbers provided are RGB value):
(255, 247, 209) → default highlight
(47, 0, 0) → default highlight
(60, 0, 0) → dark red
(66, 0, 0) → dark red
(165, 0, 0) → red
(128, 128, 128) → default highlight
(0, 148, 255) and (255, 0, 0) → red
(0, 255, 0) and (255, 216, 0) with same area → yellow
same but flipped → yellow
(255, 180, 180) → light red
(255, 210, 210) → default highlight
pure blue, pure yellow, pure red, and pure green with same area → yellow
(255, 61, 61) → red
(82, 0, 0) → dark red
Best Answer
Babun already incorporates the terminal I was going to suggest you install (mintty), which implements more recently supported than PuTTYcyg, which implements a PuTTY wishlist item. IMHO, this is easily the best terminal emulator available for Windows. (Actually, it appears the Cygwin community has also concluded this; is mintty now the default for Cygwin too? Nice!)
Any reasonable terminal emulator will let you change its colors. In mintty, it's in the "Looks" section:
I can't say I've ever used mintty or Babun, but presumably one of those buttons has what you're looking for. (The above image was taken from the babun website.)
See also this Stack Overflow question on changing colors in Cygwin terminals, which among many answers for different terminal emulators (including CMD.exe, which I strongly advise against), has an answer for rxvt, where you'd want a line in
~/.Xdefaultsthat saysRxvt*color3: #eeaa11Update: The "Color Scheme Designer" button goes to a website of some sort and the Theme drop-down may initially be empty. There's a nice 4bit Terminal Color Scheme Designer out there (possibly even the destination of that button?) which can be used to create a theme.
To save you the effort, I've created a very basic theme, which I believe you merely need to add to your
~/.minttyrcfile (which may not yet exist):(I created this with Dye = color, Background = bright_white, Foreground = black, then Hue was moved from the center half way to the left extreme and Saturation was maxed out to the right.)
You can use the "Foreground" button's color selector to refine the Red, Green, and Blue channels from the above Yellow or BoldYellow as desired. Update the corresponding line in
~/.minttyrcand hit "Cancel" in that color selector (or else your default color would become that yellow).I assume changes will require starting a fresh instance of the terminal. It's possible that they actually require resetting some sort of ~daemon, in which case you might have to reboot (though I doubt it).