Help! Somehow my terminal looks like this:
It's nearly impossible to read the text. How can I fix it without exiting the terminal?
Ubuntu – How to reset the colors of the terminal
command linegnome-terminal
Related Solutions
It's Shift + Ctrl + F.
You might want to change the Scrollback value to Unlimited to not lose any lines:
Edit > Profile Preferences > Scrolling
I think the problem here is that you are trying to get vim, which expects to run in a terminal, to recognize a CTRL-SHIFT sequence. While it's possible for X to recognize such combinations, applications that run in a terminal (or, these days, a terminal emulator) cannot. This is because, historically, terminals could only send and receive seven- or eight-bit sequences of ASCII data across a serial connection (though this could include "escape sequences" that position the cursor, scroll or delete lines, change color and other helpful effects).
There are 32 "Control Codes" in the ASCII character set, including the familiar CTRL-A through CTRL-Z. But there are no corresponding ASCII codes for "CTRL-SHIFT" A through Z. Now, gnome-terminal itself can recognize these codes (CTRL-SHIFT-V, for instance, will paste text from the clipboard), but vim will not be able to have direct access to it.
Of course, it may be possible (I don't know) for a terminal emulator to be set up to convert CTRL-SHIFT key presses to an escape sequence which can then be recognized by a vim mapping.
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UPDATE
You might be interested in gvim, which is a graphical version of vim that runs as an X program rather than a terminal program. Maybe gvim will be able to understand CTRL-SHIFT codes?
Best Answer
The likely cause of this problem are ANSI Escape Codes. These allow scripts to change the foreground and background color of the terminal. You can even mimic the colors of the screenshot above by running the following command:
To reset the terminal colors, use the following command:
According to the manpage:
init If the terminfo database is present and an entry for the user's terminal exists (see -Ttype, above), the following will occur: (1) if present, the terminal's initialization strings will be output as detailed in the terminfo(5) section on Tabs and Initialization, (2) any delays (e.g., newline) specified in the entry will be set in the tty driver, (3) tabs expansion will be turned on or off according to the specification in the entry, and (4) if tabs are not expanded, standard tabs will be set (every 8 spaces). If an entry does not contain the information needed for any of the four above activities, that activity will silently be skipped.This should restore your terminal to its original colors.