Xterm Colors – How to Fix Too Bright Xterm Colors

colorsterminalxterm

I've just started using dwm a couple days ago and I'm using xterm (uxterm) as a terminal emulator.

However, I'm noticing that certain applications (like vi/vim, ls, and others) that output in color are using bright colors and (sometimes) bold fonts. My terminal's background color is a dark pastel so I'd like the colors to match.

How can I change these colors, is there a way to use #xxxxxx colors?

Best Answer

Xterm is configured via X resources. This is how you might configure it for white on black, with a lighter blue than the default (adjust the color as you see fit, obviously):

XTerm.VT100.background:         Black
XTerm.VT100.color0:             Black
XTerm.VT100.color1:             Red
XTerm.VT100.color2:             Green
XTerm.VT100.color3:             Yellow
XTerm.VT100.color4:             CornflowerBlue
XTerm.VT100.color5:             Magenta
XTerm.VT100.color6:             Cyan
XTerm.VT100.color7:             White
XTerm.VT100.colorBD:            White
XTerm.VT100.colorBDMode:        true
XTerm.VT100.colorUL:            Yellow
XTerm.VT100.colorULMode:        true
XTerm.VT100.cursorColor:        Red
XTerm.VT100.foreground:         White

You can use X color names (you can see all the color names with xcolors or in a file called rgb.txt which may be somewhere under /etc/X11, /usr/X11 or /usr/share/X11 or some similar location depending on your system) or #RRGGBB. colorBD is the color used for bold; with colorBDMode set to false (the default), this setting is ignored and bold text is displayed in a bold font. The same goes for colorUL, colorULMode and underline. You can go beyond color8 (up to color255, or less depending on the xterm version and compile-time configuration). color8 through color15 correspond to 0–7 with bold; colors beyond 16 are rarely used by applications unless you've explicitly configured them.

Put these settings into a file called ~/.Xdefaults. Most systems load this file automatically when you log in. If yours doesn't, add this command to your X startup script:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

To test the appearance of foreground color 42 over background color 17, run this in a shell in that terminal:

printf '\033[38;5;%dm\033[48;5;%dm%s\033[0m\n' 42 17 "Hello, world."

If your xterm is compiled without extended color support, you'll need to use the classical control sequences:

printf '\033[3%dm\033[4%dm%s\033[0m\n' 4 1 "Hello, world."

The foreground and background color must be in the range 0–7 in that case. If your xterm is compiled with 16-color support, replace [3 and [4 by [9 and [10 respectively to select the bright versions (colors 8–15).

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