Linux – how to change the color of the terminal

bashcentoslinuxterminal

I'm using CentOS 4.8. I like the grey background color and the black foreground color,by which my eyes wouldn't sore.

when I set 'export PS1="\e[0;30m\e[47m\u@\h \w>"' , It only changes the bash prompt line colors.

When I'm editing text via 'vi' or looking up information via 'info',the colors are back to default.

So I'm wondering how to change the background and foreground color globally. thanks for any tip.

updates:

My CentOS is server version, so there is no gui interface.

Best Answer

The terminal color is set by a flag on the xterm command (if you're running X of course):

-bg color
This option specifies the color to use for the background of the window. The default is ''XtDefaultBackground.''

-fg color
This option specifies the color to use for displaying text. The default is ''XtDefaultForeground.''
-fn font

Related Solutions

Using colour schemes with vim and putty

By default, PuTTY presents itself as xterm. The terminfo database, used by various programs to determine the terminal capabilities, says xterm supports eight colors only:

$ infocmp -1L xterm | grep max_colors

This means that even if your version of Xterm does support 256-color mode, programs won't know about it.

The easiest fix is to set your $TERM environment variable to xterm-256color.

(In your ~/.profile, you could use:
if [ "$TERM" = xterm ]; then TERM=xterm-256color; fi)
You can tell PuTTY to always identify itself as xterm-256color, via Configuration → Connection → Data → Terminal-type string.

Note: If you use #1 or #2, and you connect to a server which doesn't have the apropriate terminfo entry, all TUI programs will break.
You can also set the 't_Co' option in vim to 256 to override the terminfo value.
```
if &term == "xterm"
    set t_Co=256
endif
```

Or you could edit the terminfo database.

$ infocmp -L -1 xterm | sed -r 's/(max_colors)#[0-9]+/\1#256/' > /tmp/xterm
$ tic /tmp/xterm

The updated entry will be kept in ~/.terminfo.

Change font color on linux terminal

just needed to include the -store setting. the following does the trick perfectly:

setterm -foreground green -store

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using colour schemes with vim and putty

Change font color on linux terminal

Related Question