Custom Colors for CLI

slack_ · 02-26-2014, 03:27 PM

Hello, I've been reevaluating my current desktop theme and I find myself rather stifled by certain cli programs. Programs such as mocp and whatnot tend to only use a very small amount of colors. Ugly ones usually. Yet somehow other people seem to overcome this problem. Is there such thing as a mocp that uses more then just 8 colors? For example:

http://jwcxz.com/other/mocp/moc.png

That color scheme seems impossible, yet it is obviously not. How does one achieve this?

notKlaatu · 02-26-2014, 04:02 PM

To some degree it will depend upon what terminal emulator you as using, since some new fancy ones (Gnome Terminal, Konsole) have their own theme settings.

Traditionally, however, something like rxvt or unicode-rxvt looks at ~/.Xdefaults for its colour scheme and so on.

Here is what I have in mine. It's a sort of Tango-ish muted earth tone thing:

Code:

! to match gnome-terminal "Linux console" scheme
! foreground/background
URxvt*background: [90]#000000
URxvt*depth: 32
URxvt*foreground: #ffffff
! black
URxvt.color0  : #000000
URxvt.color8  : #555555
! red
URxvt.color1  : #AA0000
URxvt.color9  : #FF5555
! green
URxvt.color2  : #00AA00
URxvt.color10 : #55FF55
! yellow
URxvt.color3  : #AA5500
URxvt.color11 : #FFFF55
! blue
URxvt.color4  : #0000AA
URxvt.color12 : #5555FF
! magenta
URxvt.color5  : #AA00AA
URxvt.color13 : #FF55FF
! cyan
URxvt.color6  : #00AAAA
URxvt.color14 : #55FFFF
! white
URxvt.color7  : #AAAAAA
URxvt.color15 : #FFFFFF

! to change font size, do so here then run
! xrdb -merge .Xdefaults
! then restart urxvt
URxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=12

URxvt*boldFont: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=12
URxvt*letterSpace: -1
URxvt.perl-ext-common : default,tabbed
!URxvt.perl-ext-common : default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher     : firefox
URxvt.matcher.button  : 1

! scrollbar style - rxvt (default), plain (most compact), next, or xterm
URxvt.scrollstyle: plain
URxvt.scrollBar_right: True
URxvt.iconFile:    /usr/share/icons/gnome/256x256/apps/terminal.png
URxvt.keysym.C-Delete:  perl:matcher:last
URxvt.keysym.M-Delete:  perl:matcher:list

URxvt.colorUL: #4682B4

!TABS
!Shift+ down new tab
!Shift+ left go to left tab
!Shift+ right go to right tab
!Ctrl+ left move tab to the left
!Ctrl+ right move tab to the right
!Ctrl+D: close tab
URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-fg: 2
URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-bg: 0
URxvt.tabbed.tab-fg:    3
URxvt.tabbed.tab-bg:    0

Hope that helps.

slack_ · 02-26-2014, 04:06 PM

Indeed. But how does one apply those to something like mocp. The picture of someone's mocp that I posted seems to have multiple different custom colors. If I wanted to use a custom color in mocp, I could most certainly set my urxvt font color to whatever color I wanted, and then set the mocp color to default, which would make it use my custom urxvt font color. However that still doesn't explain how one would get multiple custom colors..

notKlaatu · 02-26-2014, 07:08 PM

Sorry I thought you were asking about terminal colours.

According to the documentation on the homepage of moc itself:

Code:

Themes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, there are themes, because people wanted them. :)

Themes can change all colors and only colors. Example theme file with a
exhausting description is included (themes/example_theme), it is the
default MOC appearance.

Theme files should be placed in ~/.moc/themes/ or $(datadir)/moc/themes/
(eg. /usr/local/share/moc/themes) directory, and can be selected
with the Theme configuration options or the -T command line option (see the man
page and the example configuration file).

Please send me themes you have created.

slack_ · 02-26-2014, 09:14 PM

No, I know you can make your own moc themes. I have my own moc theme. The thing is, it only supports eight different colors. The colors in the picture in my first post are not part of those eight colors. Somehow, the person managed to turn those regular colors into custom colors. His green seems to be a sort of chartreuse, yet in his config file it undoubtedly says "green" in those fields, because those are the only color names that mocp understands. I want to know how he does this. There seems to be literally zero information on the web about it.