# Your terminal's background colour?



## Carpetsmoker (Feb 7, 2014)

What's your terminal's background colour?

Many applications these days output text in yellow, which is near-unreadable on a white terminal, which has become something of a minor annoyance (& pet peeve) of mine.

AFAIK, white is the default background colour on most terminal emulators.
It's also the background colour of almost every application & website. It's more readable.

I'm curious how many people use a non-black background colour.


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## sossego (Feb 7, 2014)

I use a non-color colour.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 7, 2014)

Would you care to explain that?


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## trh411 (Feb 7, 2014)

I have a small collection of backgrounds that I rotate through. Using transparent x11/rxvt-unicode with shading at 45% I can make even a light background readable in the terminal window. But, I prefer darker to lighter.


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## sossego (Feb 7, 2014)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> Would you care to explain that?


http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-d ... ite-colors

Hee hee


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## worldi (Feb 7, 2014)

While I prefer having a dark background for terminals there are circumstances where it's better to have a bright one. For example, when sitting outside in the sun and all you see in the dark terminal is the bright shirt you're wearing or the white wall behind you. So I defined two keyboard shortcuts that allow me to toggle the colors in `urxvt`:


```
! Toggle colors
URxvt.keysym.F10:           command:\033]10;rgba:0000/0000/0000/ffff\007\033]11;rgba:ffff/ffff/ffff/dddd\007
URxvt.keysym.S-F10:         command:\033]10;rgba:ffff/ffff/ffff/ffff\007\033]11;rgba:0000/0000/0000/dddd\007
```


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## ChalkBored (Feb 7, 2014)

*background: grey8
*foreground: #dedede


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## JWJones (Feb 7, 2014)

Green text on black background, of course.


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## hitest (Feb 7, 2014)

Black.


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## scottro (Feb 7, 2014)

I find black text on grey very easy to read for my aging eyes. However, at work, we have some odd color prompts on some servers, and some things, such as green or some shades of blue, can be hard for me to read.  So I have ssh set to use a terminal of cadetblue, which seems to go with all color schemes that various admins have used for various prompts.


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## protocelt (Feb 7, 2014)

sossego said:
			
		

> I use a non-color colour.


Answer: "What is impossible?"

I use black or navy blue for background color.


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## roddierod (Feb 7, 2014)

I'm currently using #073642 as my background which is $base02 from the Solarized palette


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## nestux (Feb 7, 2014)

roddierod said:
			
		

> I'm currently using #073642 as my background which is $base02 from the Solarized palette



I use green text on black background but I would try that.


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## c083d4 (Feb 7, 2014)

Grey with black text in xterm, black with green text in MATE Terminal.


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## kpedersen (Feb 7, 2014)

My background is black but I have different color text per DWM workspace.
I love green text on a proper old-school monitor but it kinda makes me feel wierd when on a modern LCD. Kinda similar to how old chip tunes sound stupid when used as ringtones on modern phones.
Pure white text on a black background looks strangely modern. I think this was pioneered by Apple when Darwin boots in debug mode. I think that is the only design choice from Apple that I thought was cool


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 14, 2014)

Wow. Guess I really am a freak of nature with my white terminals.


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## trh411 (Feb 14, 2014)

Since your question was posed specifically as "your *terminal's* background" I answered accordingly (black/dark). However, almost everything I do outside of a terminal is just the opposite: for these Forums, all the Google stuff I use (gmail, calendar drive, play, etc) and almost every web page I frequent has white background w/ black text.


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## serpent7776 (Feb 14, 2014)

I use black background not only for terminal, but also as vim's background and gtk theme background. I'm kind of black-background-lover.


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## Zare (Feb 14, 2014)

```
xterm*Background: black
xterm*Foreground: green
```


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 14, 2014)

trh411 said:
			
		

> Since your question was posed specifically as "your *terminal's* background" I answered accordingly (black/dark). However, almost everything I do outside of a terminal is just the opposite: for these Forums, all the Google stuff I use (gmail, calendar drive, play, etc) and almost every web page I frequent has white background w/ black text.



Yes, this is also my observation of many people (who use black terminals). Which strikes me as rather odd.

On a slightly related note, I used to own a Sun SPARCstation 5, this was probably one of the most fun computers I've ever owned. It ran really well, even though it was about 10 years old. It looked cool (even on the inside), and perhaps best of all, it was different than what anyone else I knew had (we all want to be different when we're young, right? Some get a piercing, others a mohawk. I got a SPARCstation ).
It came with a funky optical mouse and a 21" (CRT) screen. The screen came with a little remote to set the brightness ans such. Why anyone thought this would be useful, I don't know, but it looked really cool, and impressed all my friends.
So, my reason for telling you all this, the screen had a white background, always. Right from the moment you turned it on. Here's a picture of that.
I ran NetBSD on it, and in the NetBSD console it was also white (and not black, like on my x86 machines).


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## TiberiusDuval (Feb 14, 2014)

Classical green text on black background here too.


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## trh411 (Feb 14, 2014)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> trh411 said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I got to thinking after my last post that when I did Systems Management and Administration for a living, for as far back as I can remember, I always used black text on white background on my terminals. I really can't remember when or why I switched to dark backgrounds.

Anyway, today in honor of all "freaks of nature" I have converted all my terminals to black text on white backgrounds. :beer


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## shepper (Feb 17, 2014)

In times prior to powerpoint, we would make 35mm slides.  It was said that a study showed that a blue background with white text held your audiences attention without excessive fatigue.  I suspected that this was behind Microsofts BSOD.  White on Blue probably produced less rage than say Black on Red.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 17, 2014)

shepper said:
			
		

> In times prior to powerpoint, we would make 35mm slides.  It was said that a study showed that a blue background with white text held your audiences attention without excessive fatigue.  I suspected that this was behind Microsofts BSOD.  White on Blue probably produced less rage than say Black on Red.



The "BSOD blue" actually goes back back further, at least to MSX-BASIC (1984), which used a very similar colour.












Holy spaghetti code, this looks even worse than I remember. This is where I first learned to program, how I put up with it, I cannot even begin to phantom.

You could set the background & text colour by the way, with the "color" command, for some reason someone thought this was 1) important enough to bind to the F1 key, and 2) *always* display a reminder of it at the bottom of the screen ('auto' is F2, etc.)

(Ack, another post reminiscing old stuff. I feel old. I blame it on Scottro's bad influence on me).


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## tankist02 (Feb 17, 2014)

I use white background. Tried green on black - looked weird and hard on my eyes. Clashed with majority of web sites colors (dark on light). I guess I spent too much time reading books (black on white).


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## oops (Feb 18, 2014)

White usually and `xcalib -a -i` when I'm sleepy.


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## Juanitou (Feb 18, 2014)

Background: #131313
Foreground: #C8C8C8


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## schrodinger (Feb 18, 2014)

My background is "Navajo White"

Too many hours exploring `xcolsel`


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## trh411 (Feb 23, 2014)

According to Computer Eye Strain: 10 Steps for Relief, black text on a white background incurs less strain on the eyes than light text on a dark background. A few other articles supported this position. I could not find any articles that took the opposite position.

But hey, it's the Internet. Let the reader beware.


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## ChalkBored (Feb 26, 2014)

Black text on a light background helps when you're working in brightly lit rooms. 
If you followed the other steps in the article, the white screen becomes annoyingly bright and hard on the eyes.

Even if you do go with light backgrounds, you'll probably want something less harsh than pure white.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 26, 2014)

ChalkBored said:
			
		

> If you followed the other steps in the article, the white screen becomes annoyingly bright and hard on the eyes.



Lower your screen's brightness & contrast. I have mine set to about 40-50 during the day, and ~20-25 when it's dark.


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