Re: Colors Suck.

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From: Luke Kanies
Subject: Re: Colors Suck.
Date: 17:03 on 09 Sep 2005
On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, sabrina downard wrote:

>      "Black and white text is boring. With colors your file comes to
>      life. This not only looks nice, it also speeds up your work."
>
> black and white text is legible on my xterm, you goddamned presumptively
> default configured pile of /shit/.  if i wanted syntax highlighting and
> all my twiddles turned dark blue, i know how to do it my own damn self.
>
> i hate logging on to a new system and having to adjust my .profile and
> .exrc to override all the whiz-bang shiny defaults that all the clever
> fifteen year-olds think are required.  setting a path?  reasonable.
> setting up color defaults for everything from ls to vim to my damned
> command-line prompt?  knock it off!

While I generally agree that people thinking they're smarter than the
user is a stupid thing (I'm talking to you and your .inputrc, Red Hat!),
I also have to agree with this particular snippet that colors rock.

Unfortunately, even though basically no one alive still uses a white
background in xterms, all colors default to working fine on white
backgrounds but working for shit on dark backgrounds.  I spent a
significant amount of time a few years ago stealing all of the colors
for dark backgrounds from GVim (no, not vim -- I never got it's "dark
background" thing to work) and getting them to work for me.

I've added them all to my .Xdefaults file, and now the colors actually
look good (i.e., no dark, unreadable blue, except on Apple's crappy
Terminal.app):

Rxvt*color0:         Black
Rxvt*color1:         #ffa0a0
Rxvt*color2:         Green3
Rxvt*color3:         #ffff60
Rxvt*color4:         #80a0ff
Rxvt*color5:         Orange
Rxvt*color6:         #40ffff
Rxvt*color7:         Wheat
Rxvt*color8:         Grey25
Rxvt*color9:         IndianRed
Rxvt*color10:        Green3
Rxvt*color11:        #40ffff
Rxvt*color12:        #80a0ff
Rxvt*color13:        #ffa0a0
Rxvt*color14:        #40ffff
Rxvt*color15:        Wheat
Rxvt*cursorColor:    Wheat

This is (somewhat obviously) black background and wheat foreground.  I
kind of ran out of colors, and I never got bold to work so the last 8
are entirely redundant.

-- 
Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient
capital to form a corporation.       --Howard Scott
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config.sage.org

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