How to change that horrible dark blue in gnome terminal?

[Red Squirrel]

I'm trying to edit a script here and comments are an unreadable shade of dark blue which kills the eyes trying to read it. I found an option where I can change the colors but nothing happens, and when I go back, it's just reverted. How do I globally change that color. I remember having to do the same in putty.

If it matters, I'm using the terminal through VNC on my server. (from windows)

 

[Colt45]

edit -> current profile

But that is only for the terminal itself. i.e. everything that shows up in the default colour will be your new colour. Custom colours (eg. 'ls' with color enabled) are not affected.

I'm assuming you are reading the script in some sort of editor... which one?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Using Vim and yeah i tried edit -> current profile. It does not stick. If I go back again, the color is changed back.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm not sure if it's a default vim color scheme or if it's packaged by Debian but I can do ':set background=dark' in vim and the darker colors are replaced with lighters ones.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Actually that did the trick for vim. That's probably 80% of the time where dark colors will be an issue.

If there's a way to globally do it in the client (like in putty) it would be great to know as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I just thought of something, when I do it through the terminal app itself, I only get a close button. According to the docs there should be an OK button. So when I hit close it's probably just like hitting cancel in Windows. Do I need to be logged in as root to make this change?

 

[Colt45]

mine just has a close button and it works fine..

Should be a conf file in ~/.gconf/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/ called "%gconf.xml"

There should be some lines in there about colors and stuff.. but that's besides the point.. shouldnt have to edit it. are you saving under a different profile than the one you use somehow..?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Actually think I might have to restart the terminal for it to take effect. New terminal windows seem to work fine. I have about 20 of them open so not ready to close them all and reopen in one go but I'll do it over time, but yeah think that's just what I have to do.

 

[Nothinman]

Why have that many terminal windows open? Why not just run screen in one of them?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I just keep all my windows open on the server then VNC to it and have it all setup the way I need. Quicker access to all my servers (usually have 3 or so instances per server).

 

[Nothinman]

How is something as slow and bandwidth intensive as VNC faster than ssh and screen?

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
How is something as slow and bandwidth intensive as VNC faster than ssh and screen?

for serious. screen is awesome for this sort of thing (among other things)

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
How is something as slow and bandwidth intensive as VNC faster than ssh and screen?

Faster as in, not having to log in to the consoles each time. if I need to access any server I just log in to vnc and go at it. It's fairly instant at 1280*1024*32bit over a gigabit lan. It does bog down when i have too much activity going on the server though.

Best part though is I can reboot my main machine or close the vnc session at any time without losing progress.

 

[Nothinman]

The same is all 100% true for screen except you don't have the GUI overhead. You just ssh in, reconnect to your screen session and all of the terminal sessions inside of it are right where you left them.

 

[VinDSL]

Hrm...

I keep hearing about this "horrible blue background"!

What (exactly) are you referring to?

I run Gnome on several different machines (via several different distros) and I've never run across a horrible blue background, to my knowledge.

I would like to reproduce the 'problem' here, so I can SEE what everyone is complaining about... 😉

 

[Nothinman]

I believe he's talking about the text coloring done by ls and syntax highlighting in vim.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah talking about vim mostly as the blue is very hard to read. it's like a #000055 blue or something, on black.

And I'd use screen but thing is I will often need to leave a long job running in the background then do other work, so that's why I prefer the multiple terminal windows. yes I could have a bunch of putty's open but then I'm stuck with all thsoe taking up taskbar space, so that's why I just do it straight on the server.

 

[Nothinman]

Once again screen does that. It's main purpose is to let you have multiple shells open and keep them running while you're disconnected. You should probably look into what screen can actually do before dismissing it outright.