90 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta title="How to change the colour of ls to work with bright terminal backgrounds"]]
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## Introduction
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I am using [rxvt-unicode](http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html)
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as my terminal and prefer to use a bright background due to better
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readability in the sun.
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I have tried various colour themes
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(including
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[solarized](http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized) and
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[solarized-light](https://github.com/yangzetian/xresources-color-solarized-light),
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but was never satisfied, because of changes
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they make to existing colour configurations for applications
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like mutt, alot or irssi.
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I am essentially using black as the foreground colour and
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LightYellow2 as the background colour at the moment (which I inherit
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from some very old xterm + [[!fvwm]]2 settings).
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## Motivation
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The problem with my current setup is that symbolic links are
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show in **cyan** by ***ls*** on my system and thus are pretty much
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unreadable, as you can see:
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[[!img urxvt-before.png alt="urxvt with unreadable cyan colour"]]
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## The solution
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As the problem mainly arises by the use of ls, I initially thought
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about modifying the **LS_COLORS** variable. However, as I frequently
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login to servers that are variable does not effect the colour output
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on the servers (and modifying AcceptEnv on all servers is also not
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realistic).
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As I do not want to have cyan output on my LightYellow2 background
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at all, I thought about changing the colour cyan to black.
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I found a nice colour table on [[!gentoowiki Rxvt-unicode#Color_theme]],
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with description of colour number to name:
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!black
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*color0: #251f1f
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*color8: #5e5e5e
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!red
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*color1: #eb4509
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*color9: #eb4509
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!green
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*color2: #94e76b
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*color10: #95e76b
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!yellow
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*color3: #ffac18
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*color11: #ffac18
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!blue
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*color4: #46aede
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*color12: #46aede
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!magenta
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*color5: #e32c57
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*color13: #e32c57
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!cyan
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*color6: #d6dbac
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*color14: #d6dbac
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!white
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*color7: #efefef
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*color15: #efefef
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## The result
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So in the end, only the following entries in .Xresources are
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required to make cyan symbolic links readable by changing
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cyan to black:
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URxvt.background: LightYellow2
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URxvt.foreground: black
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URxvt.color6: black
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URxvt.color14: black
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And this is how it finally looks like:
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[[!img urxvt-after.png alt="urxvt with cyan changed to black"]]
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## SEE ALSO
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* [Terminal Colours](http://ciembor.github.io/4bit/)
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* [[!archwiki X_resources]]
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* [[!archwiki Rxvt-unicode]]
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[[!tag terminal unix urxvt]]
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