mrxvt is quite good, but my inability to work out how to change the colors is getting to be a pain. The directories come out in dark blue and the background is dark grey, so my eyesight is suffering.

Of course I'm not asking you to pity my eyes, but for any advice about how to change them (the mrxvt colors, not my eyes!). The more obvious steps, I seem to have taken, but actually it's proving really stubborn. eg. the "tic mrxvt.terminfo" which several places advise: no effect. Changing my .Xresources? No effect. Move to .Xdefaults, change it: No effect.

Somewhere, there is an overriding setting for my X colors, and I dont now which it might be. I went over to /etc/X11 and it's pretty bewildering. Can't say I know what to do.

Any advice appreciated. Cheers!

in Slackware, your .Xresources and your .Xdefaults are sourced when xorg starts, unless you have a file .xinitrc in your home, which is overriding the default xinitrc in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

running tic is only necessary if you are manually changing your terminfo database - which is used to assign keys to ASCII codes.

General colours can be changed in .Xdefaults (or .Xresources) using something like
*rxvt*color0: #000000
*rxvt*color1: #AAAAAA
! ... up to color15 with whatever hex code you like

the colours for "ls" can be changed in /etc/DIR_COLORS

the colours for your prompt can be changed by playing around with your PS1 environment variable.. (look around in /etc/profile for that)

make backups, and remember how to spell colour :-)

many thanks for you suggestion cyanescent.

Some ago, I spent sometime fiddling with DIR_COLORS, but in fact the color coding for directories was really impossible. A number of combinations had no effect.

I've just spent the last 2 hours changing my mrxvt colors and and I did manage one or things, but not directory listings. There are just too many conf files. Even within the mrxvt, with their PROFILEs section it's hard to make out what has precedence.

I'll give up for another month or two, and then dive back in.

(I use both spellings for colo(u)r, for technical stuff without the u, and for social and humanities with the u). For really really high brow stuff of course the French couleur is required. Clearly, the more "u"'s you have, the posher you can sound!