Your terminal's background colour?

Your terminal's background colour?

  • White (or something very close to it)

    Votes: 8 14.8%

  • Black (or something very close to it)

    Votes: 41 75.9%

  • Other

    Votes: 5 9.3%
  • Total voters
    54
arp242

arp242

What's your terminal's background colour?

Many applications these days output text in yellow, which is near-unreadable on a white terminal, which has become something of a minor annoyance (& pet peeve) of mine.

AFAIK, white is the default background colour on most terminal emulators.
It's also the background colour of almost every application & website. It's more readable.

I'm curious how many people use a non-black background colour.
 
I have a small collection of backgrounds that I rotate through. Using transparent x11/rxvt-unicode with shading at 45% I can make even a light background readable in the terminal window. But, I prefer darker to lighter.
 
While I prefer having a dark background for terminals there are circumstances where it's better to have a bright one. For example, when sitting outside in the sun and all you see in the dark terminal is the bright shirt you're wearing or the white wall behind you. So I defined two keyboard shortcuts that allow me to toggle the colors in urxvt:

Code: 
! Toggle colors
URxvt.keysym.F10:           command:\033]10;rgba:0000/0000/0000/ffff\007\033]11;rgba:ffff/ffff/ffff/dddd\007
URxvt.keysym.S-F10:         command:\033]10;rgba:ffff/ffff/ffff/ffff\007\033]11;rgba:0000/0000/0000/dddd\007
 
I find black text on grey very easy to read for my aging eyes. However, at work, we have some odd color prompts on some servers, and some things, such as green or some shades of blue, can be hard for me to read. So I have ssh set to use a terminal of cadetblue, which seems to go with all color schemes that various admins have used for various prompts.
 
My background is black but I have different color text per DWM workspace.
I love green text on a proper old-school monitor but it kinda makes me feel wierd when on a modern LCD. Kinda similar to how old chip tunes sound stupid when used as ringtones on modern phones.
Pure white text on a black background looks strangely modern. I think this was pioneered by Apple when Darwin boots in debug mode. I think that is the only design choice from Apple that I thought was cool ;)
 
Since your question was posed specifically as "your terminal's background" I answered accordingly (black/dark). However, almost everything I do outside of a terminal is just the opposite: for these Forums, all the Google stuff I use (gmail, calendar drive, play, etc) and almost every web page I frequent has white background w/ black text.
 
I use black background not only for terminal, but also as vim's background and gtk theme background. I'm kind of black-background-lover.
 
trh411 said:
Since your question was posed specifically as "your terminal's background" I answered accordingly (black/dark). However, almost everything I do outside of a terminal is just the opposite: for these Forums, all the Google stuff I use (gmail, calendar drive, play, etc) and almost every web page I frequent has white background w/ black text.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is also my observation of many people (who use black terminals). Which strikes me as rather odd.

On a slightly related note, I used to own a Sun SPARCstation 5, this was probably one of the most fun computers I've ever owned. It ran really well, even though it was about 10 years old. It looked cool (even on the inside), and perhaps best of all, it was different than what anyone else I knew had (we all want to be different when we're young, right? Some get a piercing, others a mohawk. I got a SPARCstation :)).
It came with a funky optical mouse and a 21" (CRT) screen. The screen came with a little remote to set the brightness ans such. Why anyone thought this would be useful, I don't know, but it looked really cool, and impressed all my friends.
So, my reason for telling you all this, the screen had a white background, always. Right from the moment you turned it on. Here's a picture of that.
I ran NetBSD on it, and in the NetBSD console it was also white (and not black, like on my x86 machines).
 
Carpetsmoker said:
trh411 said:
Since your question was posed specifically as "your terminal's background" I answered accordingly (black/dark). However, almost everything I do outside of a terminal is just the opposite: for these Forums, all the Google stuff I use (gmail, calendar drive, play, etc) and almost every web page I frequent has white background w/ black text.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is also my observation of many people (who use black terminals). Which strikes me as rather odd.

On a slightly related note, I used to own a Sun SPARCstation 5, this was probably one of the most fun computers I've ever owned. It ran really well, even though it was about 10 years old. It looked cool (even on the inside), and perhaps best of all, it was different than what anyone else I knew had (we all want to be different when we're young, right? Some get a piercing, others a mohawk. I got a SPARCstation :)).
It came with a funky optical mouse and a 21" (CRT) screen. The screen came with a little remote to set the brightness ans such. Why anyone thought this would be useful, I don't know, but it looked really cool, and impressed all my friends.
So, my reason for telling you all this, the screen had a white background, always. Right from the moment you turned it on. Here's a picture of that.
I ran NetBSD on it, and in the NetBSD console it was also white (and not black, like on my x86 machines).
Click to expand...
I got to thinking after my last post that when I did Systems Management and Administration for a living, for as far back as I can remember, I always used black text on white background on my terminals. I really can't remember when or why I switched to dark backgrounds.

Anyway, today in honor of all "freaks of nature" I have converted all my terminals to black text on white backgrounds. :beer
 
In times prior to powerpoint, we would make 35mm slides. It was said that a study showed that a blue background with white text held your audiences attention without excessive fatigue. I suspected that this was behind Microsofts BSOD. White on Blue probably produced less rage than say Black on Red.
 
shepper said:
In times prior to powerpoint, we would make 35mm slides. It was said that a study showed that a blue background with white text held your audiences attention without excessive fatigue. I suspected that this was behind Microsofts BSOD. White on Blue probably produced less rage than say Black on Red.
Click to expand...

The "BSOD blue" actually goes back back further, at least to MSX-BASIC (1984), which used a very similar colour.

basic-1.gif


msxtowers.gif


Holy spaghetti code, this looks even worse than I remember. This is where I first learned to program, how I put up with it, I cannot even begin to phantom.

You could set the background & text colour by the way, with the "color" command, for some reason someone thought this was 1) important enough to bind to the F1 key, and 2) *always* display a reminder of it at the bottom of the screen ('auto' is F2, etc.)

(Ack, another post reminiscing old stuff. I feel old. I blame it on Scottro's bad influence on me).
 
I use white background. Tried green on black - looked weird and hard on my eyes. Clashed with majority of web sites colors (dark on light). I guess I spent too much time reading books (black on white). :)
 
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