There was an interesting thread on hates-software about text and colours. For the past few years, whenever I start up a terminal application for the first time I spend a few minutes setting it to old-school green text on black background. Now, I'm all for being 31337, but I noticed that my paper, my web browser and my text editor were all black on white, so I configured my terminal that way as an experiment. I didn't go crazy, so it's staying black on white. What colours do you use in your terminals?
white on black
For development work, green on black or light blue on black.
For sessions on staging servers, yellow on black.
For sessions on production servers, red on black.
For sessions on backup servers orange on black.
Re:Different colors for different connections
Alias on 2005-09-27T08:13:21
Similar for me, except that wonder of wonders, I got to name all the boxes this time around (for my company).
So we have servers called "red", "orange", "green", "blue" (so far). For each server I have $colour on black.
It's neato:)
It's saved at least 3 accidental running of things on the wrong machine just in the last 3 months
Re:Different colors for different connections
chromatic on 2005-09-28T17:26:16
At least, you can tell which box you've connected to if you're not colorblind.
It's still a neat idea though, even if green and yellow or red and orange may be too subtle. Do you have something on the server side that changes the colors, do you have different XTerm shortcuts that connect to the appropriate boxes, or do you do something else?
Re:Different colors for different connections
wka on 2005-09-30T00:32:29
Colorblindness would be a problem. Those who are partially colorblind would have to pick colors they are able to differentiate between. Those who are completely colorblind could try white on black for one system, black on white for another, black on grey for a third, etc.Do you have something on the server side that changes the colors, do you have different XTerm shortcuts that connect to the appropriate boxes, or do you do something else?
I use different shortcuts.
Re:Black on Grey
kane on 2005-09-27T07:15:47
I've used navy blue on grey for a long time for my editor and such. It's as kelan and rjbs say, it's just much easier on the eyes.For my terminal, i use tunsten (dark grey/black) on a darker yellow. I found it the most legible, while still being able to use a colour display -- even the blue and green display well on it, as opposed to say, a black background.
The real question is what colour do you use in your editor? I use yellow (and other colours for highlighting) on a dark blue, which is a holdover from all those years I coded BASIC on my Amstrad CPC.
