Todd Zullinger wrote:
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
Bob Goodwin wrote:
Due to my poor vision I find it best to view the terminal display
with a white text on a black background. That together with a
larger font works well for me.
But when I list a directory with "ll" the text is in color with the
directories in a shade of blue that is unreadable against a black
background requiring that I do "ll --color=no" about one hundred
times a day! Can someone tell me where those colors are set so I
can change the shade of blue. I can deal with the colors as long
as the text is bright enough, in fact I have come to appreciate the
colored listing, well almost.
Thanks.
Bob Goodwin
/etc/DIR_COLORS
Actually, for gnome-terminal (and xterm, and likely other X terminal
programs) /etc/DIR_COLORS.xterm is used. And this file disables the
bold attributes that make the colors much more legible on a black
background. (IIRC, this has something to do with the default fonts
and their inability to display bold and utf-8? I forget where I got
that idea though, so it may be wildly off-base)
If you check out /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh you can see the various
files that are read for color settings. What I've done for a while
now is copy /etc/DIR_COLORS to ~/.dircolors and then source the
colorls.sh script (to get the updated colors used without having to
log out or start a ner terminal):
cp /etc/DIR_COLORS ~/.dircolors
source /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh
Then an ls in a terminal with a dark background should be much nicer.
And if you do need to cusomize it, you're doing it with your own
personal dir colors file instead of the system-wide one.
Thanks for the help but in my case it seems things are a bit different
since I use XFCE rather than Gnome.
What I discovered is that Edit > Preferences > Colors contains a palette
of available colors and I was able to simply change the dark blue to a
light shade there to solve my problem.
Operating on /etc/DIR_COLORS permits me to get some effects like reverse
video but what I really needed was a brighter text so I set that for
bold and then in the XFCE terminal preferences I was able to get a
better color.
Again thank you.
Bob Goodwin
