# How change letters and background colors



## pavlar (Mar 9, 2021)

How to change .cshrc so that user  has yellow letters on a black background. Otherwise, he has a white background behind the cursor.


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## pavlar (Mar 9, 2021)

I find      
set prompt = "%N@%m:%~ %# "
        set promptchars = "%#"
Thanks for all


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## ralphbsz (Mar 9, 2021)

Sorry, but foreground and background color are not primarily a function of your shell (or .cshrc), but of your terminal emulator. I have no idea what terminal emulator you are using, but all the ones I know of allow adjusting the colors. Look for "settings" or "tools" menus.

If you are running on the FreeBSD console: There are kernel tunable values for the default colors. Search the forum for them.

You are aware that programs can change the foreground/background color within an 8-color setting, by using ANSI escape sequences? So changing your color using just the prompt is likely to not have the desired effect, once you start a program such as emacs or vi that will change colors internally. Please learn about ANSI escape sequences (they tend to be of the form "ESC [ 31 m"), and understand how VTxxx emulators set colors.


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## sidetone (Mar 13, 2022)

A year later anyway.

It's the kernel settings to set colors of the virtual console terminal. It was answered above about the kernel. I believe it was in rc.conf, boot.conf or it needed to be compiled with it.

To change the color of directories.

.cshrc

```
set color
setenv LSCOLORS "ax"
alias ls    ls -G
```
a is for yellow, and x is to match the background color.
`ls -G` colorizes output. In the file, `ls` is aliased to `ls -G`

ls(1)


> LSCOLORS


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