Change colors in console/virtual terminal

colorscommand lineconsoleescape-charactersvim

Is there a way to alter all the available colors in console / virtual terminal?
By console, I mean what you get after pressing CTRL + ALT + F1 and not anything like xterm or urxvt. So, I guess that would mean alter

I can change 8 of the colors using escape sequences like so:

echo -en "\e]PY######"

where Y is the numerical id of the color (0 to 7) and ###### is the hex color value.

My ultimate goal is to port the solarized color scheme to the console, because I want to look vim all the same regardless of whether I'm in console or X.

Any suggestions on this?

htop in xterm:
htop in xterm, solarized colors

htop in console, after applying the 8 colors:
htop in console, after applying the 8 colors I could

Best Answer

TTY framebuffer console has no way to have more than 8-16 colors without kernel hacking, see this quote: "Although the Linux frame-buffer supports 256 (or more) colors, the Linux console driver does not; therefore, console applications are still limited to 16 colors on the Linux console, frame-buffer or not."

So you can have no more than 16 or 8 colors. There is tutorial how to change colors for framebuffer terminal (aka ctrl+alt+1) using same commands as you described in ~/.bashrc: colors in TTY tutorial

Related Solutions

Linux – How to get VIM to display 256 colors properly

Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.

I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.

Hum... After your edit, can you check if the vim colour theme is properly defined for terminals?

Linux – How to Print Console Colors

If you check tput colors, you'll probably see that the answer is 8. The way to show the bright colors is by tput bold.

This shows all 8x8x2 combinations of foreground and background, normal and bold.

for cmd in sgr0 bold; do
  tput $cmd
  for i in $(seq 0 7); do
    for j in $(seq 0 7); do
      tput setaf $i; tput setab $j; echo -n " $i,$j "
    done
    tput sgr0; echo; tput $cmd
  done
done

Best Answer

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Linux – How to get VIM to display 256 colors properly

Linux – How to Print Console Colors

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