Easy on the eyes: the solarized color theme
I recently set up the solarized color theme for my terminal emulator. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but procrastinated. However, I finally got really frustrated with the colors I get from “ls” sometimes — I use a dark terminal with light fonts, and the directory listings in particular can become invisible, with dark blue on black.
Solarized is much improved. All of the colors work well together and are easy on the eyes. What a relief! Recommended for programmers and system administrators. There are plugins or configuration files for a huge variety of programming environments and programs, including Vim of course.
I use XFCE’s terminal, and I found that there was no terminal configuration file for it in the download. But I found a workaround: just append the colors listed in this file to the end of $HOME/.config/Terminal/terminalrc.



Baron, thanks a million for this post! Just installed solarized terminals for macosx terminal.app that I use everyday. These new ones are easy on the eyes with great color balance.
Sean Hull
3 Aug 11 at 4:00 am
I made the mistake of installing that in my terminal — oh *man* does that make IRC suck.
Tim McCormack
29 Aug 11 at 1:12 pm