Or configuring LS COLORS

After successfully Theming Emacs, I decoded to turn my efforts to providing more copacetic colors in other aspects of my working environment. I’ll write more about my effort to write my own color theme for fvwm when it is closer to being done. For now, I’ll concentrate on “ANSI Colors” in XTerms, and how one may theme those. The old Tektronics (or ANSI) terminals had 8 colors, namely, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white. These colors had a normal, and a bright mode. The default set of colors is OK, but is not optimal, since they have to work on both dark and light backgrounds; however, I use mostly dark background colors.

Given that, I set to design my own colors, using fully laturated colors, with a base luminosity of 70, and equally spaced in chroma — and used the same saturation and chroma, but a luminosity of 80, for the bright set. This results in a pleasant pastely set of colors, which are e4asy on the eyes, when used on very dark backgrounds. The configuration can be seen in XTerm. I set the colors for rxvt as well as xterm. Now, the most noticeable effect of these changes is if using the color option for ls, therefore the next thing to do was to configure the colors used by ls using a utility dedicated for that task, namely, dircolors. By trial and error, I modified the default configuration provided by dircolors and ended up with dir colors, with the results as you see.