Seeing as it’s the holidays, and I’m filling all my time with pointless activities already, I thought I’d beautify my much loved terminal by designing my own colour scheme.

I started by looking for pre-existing schemes, but firstly, they’re not all that easy to find for someone using gnome-terminal as their terminal emulator, and secondly what I did find really didn’t fulfil what I was looking for. Colour schemes in general either seem to be overly contrasty and garish, or so subtle that I think I’d end up holding up colour cards to my screen.

The result

Try it out

Set the following¹ in gconf settings at /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default²

background_color #101010101010
pallete #1B1B1B1B1B1B:#BFBF5D5D5454:#73737F7F3232:
#E9E9FFFF7272:#58588282B2B2:#757550507B7B:
#464686869E9E:#D3D3D7D7CFCF:#555557575353:
#73733E3E3939:#9393A6A63131:#EDEDFFFF8B8B:
#72729F9FCFCF:#ADAD7F7FA8A8:#5959ABABC9C9:
#EEEEEEEEECEC
foreground_color #FFFFFFFFFFFF

gconf-editor provides a nice simple GUI with which to do so.

¹Note that, I’ve added line breaks to the pallette setting that need to be removed.

²Or of course any other profile so that you don’t have to try it out on your default.