Comments on: Adjusting text colors in cygwin.

Question: Adjusting text colors in cygwin.

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:03:30 -0800

How can I make the blue text brighter, in vim, in cygwin?

I've googled, but the only explanations I've found that I understand deal with changing X preferences, such as in .Xconfig. But I'm not using X (I could, but then I'd be using gvim, and that defaults to a white background, and I want to fuck with that even less). What file do I need to change to make the blue text lighter, so that I can see it against the black background?

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:04:48 -0800

Correction: I can run regular vim (not gvim) in X. But it still defaults to a white background. I want a good old fashioned console-type situation, but with readable text.

By: sleslie

sleslie — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:27:24 -0800

~/.vimrc, where ~ is your home directory. I googled "vimrc settings", and I got enough pages that should provide you with hours of enlightenment... no, wait. I'm supposed to say "RTFM" here :)

The following should work, but note two things: I am using gvim at home and I am using vim at work under linux. I'm currently downloading vim for cygwin at home, but I have reason to believe that this will work.

By: sleslie

sleslie — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:31:48 -0800

ahem..."the following" being what I put in my .vimrc file:

colorscheme murphy

works for gvim at home on WinXp and for vim on Linux.

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 06:16:16 -0800

The very first thing every Cygwin user should do is drop the default stock windows "Command Prompt" and run rxvt. You don't need an X server running, rxvt is a dual mode program - it will use X11 if $DISPLAY is set, otherwise it will use native windows GDI calls.

For example, I use:

rxvt -geometry 130x60 -bg black -fg gray -cr white -fn "Lucida Console-11" -sr -sl 5000 -j -cr white -tn rxvt -e bash -li

Actually, I don't use that anymore - I moved most of those settings into ~/.Xdefaults (which rxvt will still read, even when it's not operating in X11 mode.)

From there you can go on to assign any arbitrary RGB color to each of the 16 standard color slots. Normal dark blue is 4, so for example rxvt -color4 "light steel blue" would select a different shade. This is all in the rxvt man page, just search for "color".

But the important part is that CMD.EXE sucks ass and nobody should ever use it.

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:07:24 -0800

Where can I find a list of other colorschemes like 'murphy'? Again, I have tried googling, but I'm lame or not finding it for some other reason.

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:23:44 -0800

Found it: /usr/share/vim/vim63/colors/

Not that this will necessarily solve my problem, but it could.

By: reynaert

reynaert — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:34:50 -0800

You could also type ":colorscheme " and use tab completion.

It's also important to tell Vim whether your terminal uses a dark or a light background color. If you find the blue in the default colorscheme too dark, it probably thinks you're using a white background. Try ":set background=dark".

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 10:56:14 -0800

Hmm...that's very interesting reynaert...but how do you set background to dark from within .vimrc (or better yet, from within .Xdefaults, so it can (I hope) affect the xterm too? I tried background=dark in .vimrc but it didn't go over well with the uh...compiler or something.

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 11:03:09 -0800

...actually, I don't mean xterm. I mean, whatever the cygwin terminal window is called. Because I have the same problem there. So setting up a default color scheme for vim is fine, but it doesn't help anything I do outside of vim. Which I know was not my original question, but I'm getting greedy.

By: reynaert

reynaert — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:22:01 -0800

To make your terminal dark, try putting something like this in your .Xdefaults file:

XTerm*foreground: white
XTerm*background: black

Now about Vim. I misunderstood your problem, I thought that you had a black background and Vim choosed colors that were to dark to read. So I might have misled you with my answer. The background option is not there to set the background color: it is there to tell Vim what the background color of your terminal is, so Vim can adjust the colorscheme. So if you have a white background, you should set it to "light", and if you have a black background, to "dark", and hopefully you get readable colors :)

So in your .vimrc you'd add something like this (assuming you also did the .Xdefaults thing and actually have a dark terminal now :):

set background=dark
colorscheme elflord

(I think you forgot the set keyword, and Vim complained about that.)

By: bingo

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 16:20:22 -0800

Actually, you understood my problem right the first time. What I was trying to say was: when I'm in the terminal, outside of vim, I have a black background, and text too dark to read. When I'm inside vim, then thanks to a new colorscheme and using ":set background=dark" in my .vimrc, it's no longer an issue. So what I'm basically asking for is the equivalent of ":set background=dark" for the .Xdefaults file. UNLESS, the cygwin terminal isn't affected by the .Xdefaults file...after all, it isn't really X, so is it really an xterm?

By: reynaert

reynaert — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 18:01:10 -0800

Oh, it seems I'm being my usual confused self again :)

rxvt (I think the Cygwin terminal is rxvt) will read the .Xdefaults file on its own if it isn't running on X, so that shouldn't be a problem.

According to the man page (Colors and Graphics section) it is possible to tweak the colors. It seems the default blue is "Blue3", so something like this in your .Xdefaults should give you a brighter shade:

XTerm*color4: Blue2

This page lists the X color names. If the shade you want isn't in there, you could try looking for an rgb.txt file and adding it yourself, rxvt might notice it.

By: bingo

bingo — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 08:29:11 -0800

Well, the color of the prompt text in the terminal is actually a dark green. I tried adding XTerm*color2: LawnGreen to my .Xdefaults, but it had no effect.

Thanks for all your help, though...