A question about background/foreground colors of the terminal

[dariyoosh]

Dear all,


I'm working with a system without any graphic interface, nither GNOME nor KDE has been
installed, It is 100% text-based. I would like to ask whether there is a command to be typed in
the terminal allowing to change the background and foreground colors permanently?


Thanks in advance,

Dariyoosh

[RupertPupkin]

Use the setterm command:

setterm -background blue -foreground yellow

Read the man page (man setterm) for the available colors. You could put that command in /etc/profile or /etc/rc.d/rc.local to make it permanent for all users, or in your ~/.bash_profile if it's just for you.

I think the default console terminal type only provides 8 colors. If you use something like xterm-256color as your terminal type (export TERM=xterm-256color) you'll get more colors, though I'm not sure how setterm would use them. You can always see how many colors are available in your terminal by typing "tput colors". The colors will probably look better if you're using a console framebuffer.

[Gödel]

setterm colors may get reset as soon as you issue a command like ls or man. Another way to change colors is to directly issue ansi escape sequences, you can put the command in ~/.bash_profile when satisfied (after changing colours you can do ctrl-L to clear the screen)

standard white on black:

echo -en '\E[0;37;40m\E[8]'

bright/bold white on black:

echo -en '\E[1;37;40m\E[8]'

black on white:

echo -en '\E[0;30;47m\E[8]'

green on black:

echo -en '\E[0;32;40m\E[8]'

Basically, in \E[X;Y;Zm, X is the attribute (bold, reverse etc), Y is foreground, Z is background

there's a color table in the links below

http://linuxgazette.net/issue65/padala.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Examples

[dariyoosh]

Dear RupertPupkin's and dear Gödel


Thank you very much both of you for your helpful answers
which solved my problem.

As RupertPupkin's indicated I typed

setterm -background white -foreground black

And I obtained the desired colors.


As Gödel indicated I added the following line to ~/.bash_profile
in order to have these colors permanently.

echo -en '\E[0;30;47m\E[8]'

Thank you very much for your help.


Kind Regards,
Dariyoosh

[Gödel]

The setterm command is easier to use, and from reading the man page I notice you can specify '-store' to make the colour combination the default.

That's also what the 'ESC [8]' sequence '\E[8]' does in the examples above, it's specific to linux consoles (see 'man console_codes')

...
Linux Console Private CSI Sequences

The following sequences are neither ECMA-48 nor native VT102. They are native to the Linux console
driver. Colors are in SGR parameters: 0 = black, 1 = red, 2 = green, 3 = brown, 4 = blue, 5 = magenta,
6 = cyan, 7 = white.

ESC [ 1 ; n ] Set color n as the underline color
ESC [ 2 ; n ] Set color n as the dim color
ESC [ 8 ] Make the current color pair the default attributes.
ESC [ 9 ; n ] Set screen blank timeout to n minutes.
ESC [ 10 ; n ] Set bell frequency in Hz.
ESC [ 11 ; n ] Set bell duration in msec.
ESC [ 12 ; n ] Bring specified console to the front.
ESC [ 13 ] Unblank the screen.
ESC [ 14 ; n ] Set the VESA powerdown interval in minutes.

...

With seterm you can specify '-store' to get the same result

setterm -foreground green -background black -store

is the same as

setterm -foreground green -background black && echo -en '\E[8]'