A black OS X Leopard Terminal theme that is actually readable
OS X Leopard was released with an updated Terminal application, which now has tabs, window groups, and many other new features. My excitement to replace the often slow iTerm was quickly extinguished as I realized that the new Terminal.app has some glaring problems:
- The first is the inability to set the title of the tab as you do in iTerm, gnome-terminal, etc. That one I can live with, as there are work-arounds.
- The other major problem is the horrible black themes that come with it (bad and worse). Apple is one of those companies who pay very close attention to visual details such as these, so it's surprising that they gave us such horrible choices.
So I decided to make a new theme, based on a subset of my popular TextMate theme IR_Black. The problem is the new Terminal app provides no way to set the ANSI colors; even though you can create your own themes (Settings), you can't change the colors. Ciarán Walsh provides a great solution to this on his blog, which uses the also great SIMBL.
Install Theme
- Install SIMBL and TerminalColors following the instructions on Ciarán Walsh's blog. This is required for the color changes in my theme to work.
- Download the theme file here.
- Double click the IR_Black.terminal file, you downloaded, to install it.
- Set it to be the default (if you want to always use these settings).
Screenshots
Test Script
The following script will display the 16 colors in the terminal:
#!/bin/bash
echo -e "\\e[0mCOLOR_NC (No color)"
echo -e "\\e[1;37mCOLOR_WHITE\\t\\e[0;30mCOLOR_BLACK"
echo -e "\\e[0;34mCOLOR_BLUE\\t\\e[1;34mCOLOR_LIGHT_BLUE"
echo -e "\\e[0;32mCOLOR_GREEN\\t\\e[1;32mCOLOR_LIGHT_GREEN"
echo -e "\\e[0;36mCOLOR_CYAN\\t\\e[1;36mCOLOR_LIGHT_CYAN"
echo -e "\\e[0;31mCOLOR_RED\\t\\e[1;31mCOLOR_LIGHT_RED"
echo -e "\\e[0;35mCOLOR_PURPLE\\t\\e[1;35mCOLOR_LIGHT_PURPLE"
echo -e "\\e[0;33mCOLOR_YELLOW\\t\\e[1;33mCOLOR_LIGHT_YELLOW"
echo -e "\\e[1;30mCOLOR_GRAY\\t\\e[0;37mCOLOR_LIGHT_GRAY"
To install script:
- Copy the script to your workstation, name it colors
- Make it executable: chmod +x colors
- Run it: ./colors
If there is an easier way to change the ANSI colors in Terminal, please let me know. Although I have had no problems with SIMBL, it's always better, if possible, not to use hacks.
Note: the color scheme I use for Vim in the screenshot above can be found here.
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Great Theme thanks!
Yes, thanks this is a great theme. Thanks!
Love it, thanks
Followed your instructions and everything worked great. I especially like the colors of your IR_Black theme.
Thank you!
Thank you so much, this theme is so nice.
Greetings
Do you know if there's any way to get it so that you can select tabs with Cmd+ as you can in iTerm? I like the look of the new Terminal, but the lack of being able to jump between tabs easily has forced me back to iTerm :( In Terminal, it seems Cmd+ is only good for jumping between terminal /windows/ rather than tabs :(
Peter, yes, I found that annoying as well. Ciarán Walsh has a solution for that as well, you can find it here:
ciaranwal.sh/2007/12/10/tab-switching-in-terminal
It allows you to switch tabs using ⌘1-9 like in iTerm.
Or you could have just used LS_COLORS in your .bashrc
Karl,
LS_COLORS just changes the output colors of the ls command. It doesn't affect anything else, such as vim's colors in the screenshot above. You can set, for example, keywords in vim to be blue, but that doesn't affect how you see the color blue in Terminal.
You only get 16 colors in Terminal, it's a shame if some of them are unreadable.
If all you want is ls to output something other than blue for directories, then setting LS_COLORS is a good option.
Great theme, Thanks!
In your screenshots the text looks thinner than on my screen (Mine looks bold). Did you change your text at all?
Rob,
I have mine set to Monaco 12pt, normal/use bold fonts/don't use bright colors for bold text. The settings are in the .terminal file, so they should have come along with the theme.
I did notice that it looks different on different machines, depending on your monitor and your "Font smoothing style" settings. I have a Dell 20" and an HP 23", on two different machines, and the HP looks less bold than the Dell.
Very nice... I'm not sure where I got it from, but I've always used this little bash script for checking colors in the Terminal: pastie.caboo.se/144897
Kevin
Sorry for the double comment, I thought I'd post a screenshot of how I adapted your theme:
www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmarsh/2228953878/
Using Panic Sans 10pt (from Coda), and rgb(43, 43, 43) for the background.
Looks great - but I can't get it working. I would have said that I did everything correctly. But.... I installed the SIMBL. I put the TerminalColors into /Lib.../Appli..Supp.../SIMBL/plugins. I downloaded your theme and double-clicked it... It displays the black background, but no different colors within the terminal window. Any idea why this would be?
Just found it: one needs to add
export CLICOLOR=1;
to .bash_profile as indicated here ( www.aidanf.net/blog/2008/01/29/improving-leopard-terminal )
Oups, sorry, another one: it doesn't display the "computer_name.. user$" in a different color. How can I change that? And is there a way to modify the different settings in a text file or so? Using for example a background color for directories or so? I can't see where I could edit this...
Stef,
I'm glad you got it working and it's nice that people are enjoying the theme.
You may want to read my article on setting up bash, it can be found here:
www.infinitered.com/blog/?p=19
There is a lot of information, but you can get started quickly by using the example configuration files and tweaking them.
Do you know of a work-around to get TerminalColors working with 10.5.2?
Daaku,
I haven't updated to 10.5.2 yet, but in the comments section of Ciaran Walsh's post there is a work-around:
ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal
Update: I noticed that Ciaran Walsh updated his plugins, so that they now work with 10.5.2: ciaranwal.sh/2008/02/12/terminal-plug-in-updates. Thank you Ciaran.
I was able to get it to work all except for your screenshot of your ruby code. When I open an .rb file in either vim or pico I don't get the cool code coloring.
Initially I didn't get the colors but I copied your .bash_login and .bashrc files according to your post at www.infinitered.com/blog/?p=19 and that worked. Also, I ran the "colors" test and it also displayed fine.
Is there anything else I needed to do to get colors working in vim/pico?
Great article. Could you post your vim colorscheme as well?
Thanks in advance.
Anyone else having problems with SIMBL with the new 10.5.2 update?
"Terminal 2.0.1 (v240) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer (not the SIMBL author) for further information."
Anyone have a fix?
Found the fix in the comments @ ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal
Jeff, regarding colors in vim/pico:
I have no idea about pico, but vim supports colorschemes. gVim and MacVim are very flexible with syntax coloring; as flexible as TextMate is. Vim in the command-line, however, can only use the 16 colors Terminal supports. You turn it on (syntax on) and set your colorscheme (colorscheme foo) in your vimrc or with a command at runtime; how to do this is out of scope of this comment, but the vim documentation explains it all.
Duncan,
The colorscheme I use in the screenshot is a vim version of my TextMate IR_Black theme. It's not 100% refined yet, but it works well for many file types, including Ruby. It also works well in both the command-line and MacVim.
I'll probably post it later when it's a 100%, but you're welcome to it now, you can get it at:
www.infinitered.com/settings/ir_black_beta.vim
* Update: I have now finished the Vim color scheme, you can find it here:
blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/8
I've followed all the instructions. Using your bash files, setting up SIMBL and TerminalColours, but no luck. I get the "More" button with no issue, and I even get the correct output of the color script. I'm even getting coloring on the welcome banner and on the prompt as set in your .bash_profile file. But I'm not getting any color on directories, or files. It's late, maybe I've missed something...
The colorscheme "ir_black_beta.vim" is perfect with MacVim. That is what I am looking for. Thanks for sharing it.
I find that the "Visual" setting in "ir_black_beta.vim" doesn't work well. So I change it from:
hi Visual guifg=NONE guibg=#12132B ...
to:
hi Visual guifg=NONE guibg=darkgray
With no feasible way to save a terminal setings window size and location to an OS X folder this version of Terminal is unusable
Nice work on this. I'm using your ir_black.vim theme currently.
Would it be possible to get just the color values in a more standard format, like hex or rgb? Just a list is all I need to setup my linux terminal to match the ir_black.vim.
I already tried looking in the .terminal file, which is just xml, but am not sure how to translate the <data></data> blocks to something more usable.
Sean,
Yes, they are listed as comments in the vim color scheme. For those that don't have the color scheme, you can download it here: blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/8
thanks for the pointer, should of known to look there.
Really great. Thx a lot!
Theme works great, looks awesome. I adjusted the blue color a bit, and for some reason the theme doesn't save my changes?! As soon as I quit Terminal.app and launch it again, I'm right back to the default, theme-supplied color.
Help?
Please disregard the above, I am a raging idiot.
This is a nice color scheme, but I don't use mac. I'd like to adapt it for use in gnome-terminal, but I cannot view plist files. What are the rgb values you used for each of these colors?
Andy,
The colors are listed in the comments at the top of the colorscheme, they are in
hex triplets, but that's easy enough to convert to RGB (many of them already are in the comments above them).
This is a great color scheme - thanks a lot. Any chance of posting a screenshot of the palette so that it's easy to pull off the colors with the eyedropper? I use the old version of Terminal.app (the new version is laggy) and would like to use these colors with the old Terminal.app and TerminalColors. Thanks!
Actually, the default immutable Terminal.app white-text-on-black color scheme isn't so bad if you simply check "Use bright colors for bold text", which results in a similarly muted palette of pastels. I'm surprised I haven't found anything about this, and only these third-party add-on suggestion (which look great, but IMO not much better than this built-in configuration does).
An additional tip for those used to every other terminal but Apple's:
Set the keyboard mapping so that pageup/pagedn sends the pageup/pagedn key and shift pageup/pagedn scrolls the terminal buffer.
It seems obvious, but someone had to point out that terminal.app paging is frustrating because it deviates from pretty much every other terminal app out there.
Something to note about the choice of colors Apple uses (and to be clear, I do agree that they are distressing, and should not be so hardwired) is that colorblind people like me can actually differentiate between them. I am moderately red-green colorblind, and I cannot, for example, see the difference between the 'regular' and 'light' colors in your IR_Black theme.
The choice of colors Apple uses for Terminal.app would appear to not be tested on anyone, since Terminal users are not a major market/conern of Apple's. Otherwise things like the Leopard X11 bug which does not allow full screen mode would not remain after more than 1 year.
I am fully red green colorblind, and I could hardly read anything in Terminal.app before these fixes. I agree that the 'regular' and 'light' distinction in this case is not clear, but how do you expect 1 person to test for other people?
If Apple had any consideration for the colorblind, then my iPod shuffle battery status would not be yellow, green, and red LED color changing, that looks virtually identical to me.
On another note, installing SIMBL and the TerminalColours seems to have broken my vim colorscheme. I can't know for sure what's going on, but vim will no longer listen to my .vimrc for colors (which were working and I didn't change). Once I am not using Terminal for many automated tasks on a remote server, I can restart it a few times with different settings and see what happened.
I wasted an unbelievable amount of time on this. I was a bit neurotic about it. All my unix kung fu tricks did not work. This is a must have and an eyeball lifesaver. Thanks!!
Nice! Thank you!
thanks for your work.
it's really great.
Nice colours. It seems that the hex colour comments have a bug in them: your bright blue is the same as your bright yellow. I've used #CBFFFF for the blue.
I have followed your instructions and everything seems to work fine except "Use bright colors for bold text" perference don't work for me now.
I have tried repeated procedure serveral times but the issue reamains.
Todd do you have any idea how to fix it?
This theme is excellent, many thanks.
One recurring problem I seem to have is that the text keeps going bold - I want it as it's shown in the screenshot above.
I think the problem might be something to do with white being used instead of no color but I'm not really sure. I've tried all the different settings and removed and reinstalled simbl, terminal colors and the theme itself many times. It works for a while (even after a reboot) then some time later all the text is bold again.
Great theme, makes a massive improvement over the usual terminal screens!
Thx too to Stef for the export CLICOLOR=1; tip, that was driving me mad trying to figure it out....
Is there any way that you can list the hex values for the sixteen colors used in this theme?
I'd like to use these colors in Gnome Terminal, and I believe that I have to change the colors manually. I appreciate any help you can give me!
This is awesome. Thanks
Can't get the color to work on your theme, I'm using leopard 10.5.6.
I checked the "more" line en preferences, but it keeps displaying white letters only :/, I need help to get the colors working
:)
Any chance you could list the 16 colors used in RRGGBB hex format so I can use them in rxvt?
I've checked the .zip package but didnt find the actual color values there.
For linux users.. The RGB values are:
black: 0, 0, 0
light black: 124, 124, 124
red: 255, 108, 96
light red: 255, 182, 176
green: 168, 255, 96
light green: 206, 255, 172
yellow: 255, 255, 182
light yellow: 255, 255, 204
blue: 150, 203, 254
light blue: 182, 220, 255
magenta: 255, 115, 253
light magenta: 255, 156, 254
cyan: 198, 197, 254
light cyan: 223, 223, 254
white: 238, 238, 238
light white: 255, 255, 255
text: 242, 242, 242
bold text: 255, 255, 255
selection: 18, 19, 43
cursor: 255, 165, 96
background: 0, 0, 0
The Monaco font can be downloaded here: www.gringod.com/wp-upload/software/Fonts/Monaco_Linux.ttf
it goes into /usr/share/fonts (X will recognize it upon restart).
What is the easiest way to get this working on os x 10.4 for bash? Does anyone have a bash settings file that loads this theme?
Thanks!
Solution found! After struggling with getting SIMBL and TerminalColors/TerminalColours installed on Leopard 10.5.7, Terminal 2.0.2, the exact instructions at this site finally worked for me:
developizers.blogspot.com/2007/11/terminal-colors-in-leopard.html
When I'm in vi, how can I get the multi-colored syntax like you have above?
Great job, btw!! These colors are so much better on my eyes.
After much painstaking labor, I have produced the following command for Linux users forced to use the abyssmal terminal known as gnome-terminal. The following command should set your Default palette to the theme in question:
gconftool-2 -s -t string /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/palette #000000000000:#FFFF6C6C6060:#A8A8FFFF6060:#FFFFFFFFB6B6:#9696CBCBFEFE:#FFFF7373FDFD:#C6C6C5C5FEFE:#EEEEEEEEEEEE:#7C7C7C7C7C7C:#FFFFB6B6B0B0:#CECEFFFFACAC:#FFFFFFFFCCCC:#B6B6DCDCFFFF:#FFFF9C9CFEFE:#DFDFDFDFFEFE:#FFFFFFFFFFFF
If that does not work, please let me know: treehead at gmail
cRaig
Well, that doesn't work, but you can open gconf-editor and paste it in there. Why Gnome can use config files like every other Linux program is beyond me.
cRaig
How do I adjust the alpha-blend after following these instructions?
@cRaig I just wrapped quotes around the color string and the gconftool-2 command works. Remember, '#' is bash comment character.
This is awesome. Thanks
Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
P.S. - It works with Visor another SIMBL plugin for OSX Terminal
Is this working for anyone on 10.5.8? I've tried this a couple of times and got nothing, but it's probably just me.
to clarify the above, The theme installs, I see the "More" in preferences, but I don't get anything but white text no matter what I type.
This does not work on 10.6 (snow). They have disabled SIMBL support for all 32-bit applications. To bypass this right click and get info for terminal, and check off 'Open in 32-bit mode'. The next issue is that terminal 2.1 (v272) is that it claims that it has not been tested, so contact the developer. This is me contacting said developer.
Eric, I had this problem too, the solution I'm using for now in Snow Leopard is to simply use Terminal from Leopard (I copied it from another computer, renamed it, and put it in Applications/Utilities). It works fine in Snow and everything is working like it did before.
I appreciate you thinking I wrote SIMBL and TerminalColors, but I didn't.
You can find instructions to enable IR_Black in Snow Leopard (10.6) Terminal at evanphx.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
Todd; good call. The scp of Terminal.app from Leopard worked great. (YOU DIDN'T WRITE SIMBL?!?! .. j/k) Also, thanks Yaw.
SIMBL isnt loading on my Snow Leopard install at all.
No Terminal Colors for me :(
Anyone know how I check why SIMBL is not loading?
The anti-aliasing in your screenshots is looks very pleasant. On Snow Leopard, my anti-aliased text looks too heavy.
Eric, do you notice a difference?
Hmm, I've followed these instructions and have a weird issue. The colors are not applied to working on my local system (ex. running the color test script above), but if I SSH into a remove Linux box the colors work properly, including the color test script. Did I miss something? Also, when I open a new tab in Terminal it does not keep the same theme, it goes to the white background theme.
I am running 10.6.
Re: Color Test
It seems that the version of bash in 10.6 no longer likes the \e escape characters. The version of bash from 10.5 used them fine, but the 10.6 version (3.2.48) does not. However, \033 still works. So you could swap them out... or, FWIW, here is a way better color test bash script (that works with Snow Leopard):
tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html
Used the test script Dent pointed to. Works fine and shows the colors shown when clicking the More button in the preferences.
But still when using the bash no colors are applied!
Anyone got a hint?!
@Phillip: You've got to set the theme to standard to use it for every window!
By the way, using Snow Leopard if this wasn't clear. Sorry for double posting!
Sorry again ... another information: Visor is running, hence Simble is properly installed. But I had to use version 0.8.2 for getting Visor running. But no difference with 0.9.6b :(
I don't have an 'Open in 32-bit mode' checkbox in get info :(. Anyone else got the same problem?
What can I do? I need colors.
Easier way to run the testscript:
1. Copy script to clipboard
2. pbpaste | sh
pbpaste is the best tool ever once you know about it.
Jones, I am having the same issues as you. The colors script is working however all files and directories are displayed in white locally on the system. However, when I SSH to another machine they are applied correctly. Did you determine the solution?
If you want Vibrant Ink color scheme for terminal, you can get the theme file from the link below:
thaweesak.com/2007/12/06/vibrant-ink-for-leopard-terminal/
Thank you very much for this. I've been messing around with VI color schemes with black backgrounds, and its hard to get a readable combination. This fits the bill perfectly.
With Snow Leopard (SL), the steps I used to get Visor to work was:
1. Install SIMBL 0.8.2 (www.culater.net/dl/files/SIMBL-0.8.2.tbz). Version # is important! 0.9.* did not work with Visor for me.
2. Install Visor (visor.binaryage.com/). Just copy Visor.bundle to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/PlugIns/.
3. Get Info (^-Click–I) on /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. Check "Open in 32-bit mode".
4. Test out hot-key. (^-`). ^ = CTRL key. New status bar item can be used to setup the hotkey and other preferences.
Well, three days of Visor and I have uninstalled it. Not my cup of tea. I dig the transition, but the hotkey support wasnt doing it for me. I think I just like terminal behaving as a normal application rather than a status bar item/hotkey.
I am seeing the error messages above "Terminal 2.1 (v272) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0)." Is there a plan to fix this?
Cheers,
Dave
Here are the colors for those using other terminal programs: (gnome-terminal defines it's palettes in a weird way. I have no idea why each of the numbers is doubled up -- i.e. #FFFF6C6C6060 instead of #FF6C60)
0: "#000000"
1: "#FF6C60"
2: "#A8FF60"
3: "#FFFFB6"
4: "#96CBFE"
5: "#FF73FD"
6: "#C6C5FE"
7: "#EEEEEE"
8: "#7C7C7C"
9: "#FFB6B0"
10: "#CEFFAC"
11: "#FFFFCC"
12: "#B6DCFF"
13: "#FF9CFE"
14: "#DFDFFE"
15: "#FFFFFF"
I converted this to an iTerm compatible plist (pastie.org/806951). Copy the XML, open ~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.iTerm.plist, right-click on "Displays" and select "Paste".
Does any one have pointers on creating .xml colors data, I am looking to
import my .Xdefaults colors automatically.