Color Combos for Terminals

[kromberg]

What are some good foregroiund and background color combos for terminal windows?

[William Haller]

I like white on black, personally, with a transparency configured to allow just a bit of the background picture to show through.

[Gödel]

Brown on light grey is quite pleasant, or anything on black. The default black on white is fine though.

You can preview the basic combinations with this script, should work even on console terminals. (Gnome terminal et al can use 24bit colour combinations)

#!/bin/bash
#
#   This file echoes a bunch of color codes to the 
#   terminal to demonstrate what's available.  Each 
#   line is the color code of one forground color,
#   out of 17 (default + 16 escapes), followed by a 
#   test use of that color on all nine background 
#   colors (default + 8 escapes).
#  (Daniel Crisman)


T='gYw'   # The test text

echo -e "\n                 40m     41m     42m     43m\
     44m     45m     46m     47m";

for FGs in '    m' '   1m' '  30m' '1;30m' '  31m' '1;31m' '  32m' \
           '1;32m' '  33m' '1;33m' '  34m' '1;34m' '  35m' '1;35m' \
           '  36m' '1;36m' '  37m' '1;37m';
  do FG=${FGs// /}
  echo -en " $FGs \033[$FG  $T  "
  for BG in 40m 41m 42m 43m 44m 45m 46m 47m;
    do echo -en "$EINS \033[$FG\033[$BG  $T  \033[0m";
  done
  echo;
done
echo

[William Haller]

That has to win a "Cool script of the day" award somewhere.

[Gödel]

Originally Posted by William Haller

That has to win a "Cool script of the day" award somewhere.

yeah it's a nice one, I found it here http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html