What color is your terminal background?

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Woman sitting in front of her computer

Ray Smith

If you're going to staring at a terminal emulator for any significant portion of your day, you had better make it pleasing to your eyes. As with any part of the Linux operating system (and most other open source Unix-like systems), the options for customizing for your viewing pleasure are seemingly endless. There are many sample palettes out there to get you started, with some like Solarized carrying with them a dedicated fanbase. Regardless of what you choose, we all might agree that once you have your terminal tweaked to perfection, using just about anything else seems painful.

So we ask you, dear reader, what does the background to your terminal look like?

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2642 votes tallied
Light
10% (273 votes)
Dark
75% (1983 votes)
Transparent
11% (293 votes)
Image
2% (44 votes)
Other
2% (49 votes)

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Comments

25 Comments

IMHO the best color settings for terminal are the solarized ones (light or dark)
http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

I use black background with green font. I guess I have always used that, but I'm afraid people will see my screen and think, "Oooooh, he thinks he's Neo from the Matrix". So even though the green on black is my thing, I feel like I need to hide my screen so I'm not perceived as a schmuck.

I prefer they think I'm crazy about Matrix than old enough to use mac II and tandy's and get used to this color set :)

My terminal is still in the stock Mac color scheme of black text on a white background. It works for me as everything on that screen is in the same color scheme, so it's easier on my eyes to jump between windows. My IDE on the other hand is in a dark color scheme since that's where I spend most of my time, including having been using its built in terminal interface more often recently.

#002B36

There are many good answers to this question, but the best answer is #1d1f21.

And by that, I mean specifically using the Tomorrow Night theme. Grab it for your favorite term/ide/editor on GitHub here: https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme

Semi transparent, black tint. http://topher1kenobe.com/wallpapers/topher_desktop_20140228110854.jpg

Been that way for 15 years.

The best for reducing eye strain is black text on a white background.

The background should match your environment. So if you are working in a dark room, switching to a black background with white text works better.

Actually, black text on a light warm-color-pastel background.

Generally, my terminals are pointed at a variety of hosts,
with one color per host, selected mostly according to the
rule above. (There are enough remote hosts I worry about
that I have to give the more-rarely-used hosts a cool-pastel
background for their terminal windows.

Black background with 5% transparency. Light background looks too bright for me and I don't want to set it screen brightness down because of that. Too much transparency looks cool but text is arduous to read in long run.

somewhere I encountered Solarized and looked up the website from Ethan Schoonover. in Final Term Solarized is one of the choosable colour schemes. putting my LXTerminal besides I could copy the base colours of it. Solarized is very eye pleasing, looking classic and modern the same time.

Orange text on black background in ubuntu. Blue text on black in xubuntu and Lubuntu. Green text on black background in Opensuse.

black text on dark yellow background. Yes, that 'novel' color scheme provided by Mac with a little tuning.

Nothing shows your non-tech co-workers that you're some kind of wizard than white on black scrolling text.

Why would any Linux user use a Terminal Emulator?

The Virtual Terminal is a wonderful, productive thing. Why go through the trouble of waiting for X to start, fiddling with the mouse to locate a menu, click a couple of times, and then launch a Terminal Emulator ...

... just to end up where you started: the shell.... why?

Why have a terminal emulator? So you have have 40 windows open for all the things you have running - configuring five routers and four firewalls via ssh, plus a few tail'ed log files, and a tshark capture or two, plus maybe nsupdate and dc... Hard to do on the console and watch it all.

\usr\bin\screen ... That's how.

I think you misspelled "tmux" (Just kidding, of course, not trying to start a battle of the multiplexers).

...and you never want to do side-by-side comparisons ??

You can do that to with GNU Screen or TMux. In Fact TMux is quite advanced in that area.

I like the shell so much that I want to see more of it at once - chnage fonts

My first digital interface was a couple of rows of switches with lights. My first "terminal" was a teletype (so black on yellow (paper)). The early consoles were white,green or amber on black and no choice in the matter.

After we started having a choice I used a number of different color schemes. When I was younger I tended to prefer bright foreground on dark background. These days I prefer black on white.

And we typed uphill. Both ways. In the snow.

And we liked it that way.

Still do. Well, I do, anyways.

I rock it old school style with "xterm -bg black -fg green -fn fixed", i.e., xterm with green fixed (size) font on black background.

mrxvt in off white text with black background with a tab to each server I am on with gnu screen running inside each tab with many shells.