Shallow Thoughts : tags : color

X Terminal Colors (and dark and light backgrounds)

At work, I'm testing some web programming on a server where we use a shared account -- everybody logs in as the same user. That wouldn't be a problem, except nearly all Linuxes are set up to use colors in programs like ls and vim that are only readable against a dark background. I prefer a light background (not white) for my terminal windows.

How, then, can I set things up so that both dark- and light-backgrounded people can use the account? I could set up a script that would set up a different set of aliases and configuration files, like when I changed my vim colors. Better, I could fix all of them at once by changing my terminal's idea of colors -- so when the remote machine thinks it's feeding me a light color, I see a dark one.

I use xterm, which has an easy way of setting colors: it has a list of 16 colors defined in X resources. So I can change them in ~/.Xdefaults.

That's all very well. But first I needed a way of seeing the existing colors, so I knew what needed changing, and of testing my changes.

Script to show all terminal colors

I thought I remembered once seeing a program to display terminal colors, but now that I needed one, I couldn't find it. Surely it should be trivial to write. Just find the escape sequences and write a script to substitute 0 through 15, right?

Except finding the escape sequences turned out to be harder than I expected. Sure, I found them -- lots of them, pages that conflicted with each other, most giving sequences that didn't do anything visible in my xterm.

Eventually I used script to capture output from a vim session to see what it used. It used <ESC>[38;5;Nm to set color N, and <ESC>[m to reset to the default color. This more or less agreed Wikipedia's ANSI escape code page, which says <ESC>[38;5; does "Set xterm-256 text coloor" with a note "Dubious - discuss". The discussion says this isn't very standard. That page also mentions the simpler sequence <ESC>[0;Nm to set the first 8 colors.

Okay, so why not write a script that shows both? Like this:

#! /usr/bin/env python

# Display the colors available in a terminal.

print "16-color mode:"
for color in range(0, 16) :
    for i in range(0, 3) :
        print "\033[0;%sm%02s\033[m" % (str(color + 30), str(color)),
    print

# Programs like ls and vim use the first 16 colors of the 256-color palette.
print "256-color mode:"
for color in range(0, 256) :
    for i in range(0, 3) :
        print "\033[38;5;%sm%03s\033[m" % (str(color), str(color)),
    print

Voilà! That shows the 8 colors I needed to see what vim and ls were doing, plus a lovely rainbow of other possible colors in case I ever want to do any serious ASCII graphics in my terminal.

Changing the X resources

The next step was to change the X resources. I started by looking for where the current resources were set, and found them in /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color:

$ grep color /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color
irrelevant stuff snipped
*VT100*color0: black
*VT100*color1: red3
*VT100*color2: green3
*VT100*color3: yellow3
*VT100*color4: blue2
*VT100*color5: magenta3
*VT100*color6: cyan3
*VT100*color7: gray90
*VT100*color8: gray50
*VT100*color9: red
*VT100*color10: green
*VT100*color11: yellow
*VT100*color12: rgb:5c/5c/ff
*VT100*color13: magenta
*VT100*color14: cyan
*VT100*color15: white
! Disclaimer: there are no standard colors used in terminal emulation.
! The choice for color4 and color12 is a tradeoff between contrast, depending
! on whether they are used for text or backgrounds.  Note that either color4 or
! color12 would be used for text, while only color4 would be used for a
! Originally color4/color12 were set to the names blue3/blue
!*VT100*color4: blue3
!*VT100*color12: blue
!*VT100*color4: DodgerBlue1
!*VT100*color12: SteelBlue1

So all I needed to do was take the ones that don't show up well -- yellow, green and so forth -- and change them to colors that work better, choosing from the color names in /etc/X11/rgb.txt or my own RGB values. So I added lines like this to my ~/.Xdefaults:

!! color2 was green3
*VT100*color2: green4
!! color8 was gray50
*VT100*color8: gray30
!! color10 was green
*VT100*color10: rgb:00/aa/00
!! color11 was yellow
*VT100*color11: dark orange
!! color14 was cyan
*VT100*color14: dark cyan

... and so on.

Now I can share accounts, and I no longer have to curse at those default ls and vim settings!

Update: Tip from Mikachu: ctlseqs.txt is an excellent reference on terminal control sequences.

Tags: color, X11, linux, programming, python, tips
[ 10:56 Jan 18, 2011    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Configuring git colors

I spent a morning wrestling with git after writing a minor GIMP fix that I wanted to check in. Deceptively simple ideas, like "Check the git log to see the expected format of check-in messages", turned out to be easier said than done.

Part of the problem was git's default colors: colors calculated to be invisible to anyone using a terminal with dark text on a light background. And that sent me down the perilous path of git configuration.

git-config does have a manual page. But it lacks detail: you can't get from there to knowing what to change so that the first line of commits in git log doesn't show up yellow.

But that's okay, thought I: all I need to do is list the default settings, then change anything that's a light color like yellow to a darker color. Easy, right?

Well, no. It turns out there's no way to get the default settings -- because they aren't part of git's config; they're hardwired into the C code.

But you can find most of them with a seach for GIT_COLOR in the source. The most useful lines are these the ones in diff.c, builtin-branch.c and wt-status.c.

gitconfig

The next step is to translate those C lines to git preferences, something you can put in a .gitconfig. Here's a list of all the colors mentioned in the man page, and their default values -- I used "normal" for grep and interactive where I wasn't sure of the defaults.

[color "diff"]
	plain = normal
	meta = bold
	frag = cyan
	old = red
	new = green
	commit = yellow
	whitespace = normal red
[color "branch"]
	current = green
	local = normal
	remote = red
	plain = normal
[color "status"]
	header = normal
	added = red
	updated = green
	changed = red
	untracked = red
	nobranch = red
[color "grep"]
	match = normal
[color "interactive"]
	prompt = normal
	header = normal
	help = normal
	error = normal

The syntax and colors are fairly clearly explained in the manual: allowable colors are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. After the foreground color, you can optionally list a background color. You can also list an attribute, chosen from bold, dim, ul, blink and reverse -- only one at a time, no combining of attributes.

So if you really wanted to, you could say something like

[color "status"]
	header = normal blink
	added = magenta yellow
	updated = green reverse
	changed = red bold
	untracked = blue white
	nobranch = red white bold

Minimal changes for light backgrounds

What's the minimum you need to get everything readable? On the light grey background I use, I needed to change the yellow, cyan and green entries:

[color "diff"]
	frag = cyan
	new = green
	commit = yellow
[color "branch"]
	current = green
[color "status"]
	updated = green

Disclaimer: I haven't tested all these settings -- because I haven't yet figured out where all of them apply. That's another area where the manual is a bit short on detail ...

Tags: git, programming, color
[ 23:26 Feb 02, 2010    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

Vim tip: fixing the light-background color schemes

I use a light background for my X terminals (xterm and rxvt): not white, but a light grey that I find easy on the eyes. Long ago, I spent the time to set up a custom vim color scheme that works with the light background.

But sometimes I need to run vim somewhere where I don't have access to my custom scheme. It always starts up with a lot of the words displayed in yellow, completely unreadable against a light background. :set background=light doesn't help -- the default colorscheme is already intended for a light background, yet it still uses yellow characters.

I tried all the colorschemes installed with ubuntu's vim (you can get a list of them with ls /usr/share/vim/vim71/colors). The only light-background vim schemes that don't use yellow all have their primary text color as red. Do a lot of people really want to edit red text? Maybe the same people who think that yellow is a dark color?

Curiously, it turns out that if you use one of these light color schemes on a Linux console (with its black background), the yellow text isn't yellow (which would show up fine against black), but orange (which would be better on a light background).

Mikael knew the answer:

:set t_Co=88

This tells vim to use 88-color mode instead of its default of 8, and the yellow text turns light blue. Not terrifically readable but much better than yellow. Or, instead, try

:set t_Co=256

and the yellow/light blue text turns an ugly, but readable, orange (probably the same orange as the console used).

So, vim users with dark-on-light terminal schemes: add set t_Co=256 in your .vimrc (no colon) and you'll be much happier.

Update: Pádraig Brady has a great page explaining more about terminal colour highlights, including a TERM=xterm-256color setting to get vim to use 256 colors automatically. There's also a lot of good advice there on enabling colors in other console apps.

The only catch: on Ubuntu you do have to install the ncurses-term package, which will get you xterm-256color as well as 256color variants for lots of other terminal types. Here's useful page on 256-Color XTerms in Ubuntu.

Tags: editors, vim, color, tips
[ 22:29 Mar 22, 2009    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]

Helpful Vim Tip: Finding Syntax for Colors

An upgrade from woody to sarge introduced a new problem with editing mail messages in vim: Subject lines appeared in yellow, against my light grey background, so they weren't readable any more.

Vim color files have always been a mystery to me. I have one which I adapted from one of the standard color schemes, but I've never been clear what the legal identifiers are or how to find out. But I changed both places where it said "ctermfg=Yellow" to another color, and nothing changed, so this time I had to find out.

Fortunately a nice person on #vim suggested :he synID (he is short for "help", of course) which told me all I needed to know. Put the cursor on the errant line and type: :echo synIDattr(synID(line("."), col("."), 1), "name")

That told me that the Subject line was syntax class "mailSubject". So I tried (copying other lines in my color file) adding this line:

hi mailSubject term=underline ctermfg=Red guifg=Red

and now all is happy again in vim land. I wish I'd learned that synID trick a long time ago!

Tags: vim, color, editors, tips
[ 10:59 Jun 22, 2005    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]