I have a fairly fresh install of Fluxbox on my Gentoo desktop system. I am trying to configure the default colors used for xterms, gvim windows, and other textual applications. By default, if I open an xterm or run gvim, the background color is set to white and the foreground or text color is set to black. I want to reverse this.

I know you can set the fluxbox menu command for these applications to specific background and foreground colors using -bg and -fg (xterm -bg black -fg white), however this does not fix it by default; it only sets it for the menu selection.

I also set xterm*background: black and xterm*foreground: white in the .Xresources file. This sets the xterm behavior correctly, but does not fix any other app, like gvim or fbrun.

How can I set this by default? I assume there must be a way, since black on white is already set up. How can this be set for all apps? It is rather frustrating to have to set each menu choice with -fg -bg, and typing these each time in the xterm window also seems suboptimal to me.

Anyone have a clue to share with me?

I set up ~/.Xresources like this:
*background: black
*foreground: grey


then set my ~/.xinitrc with this:
xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources
exec startfluxbox


and it works.