As our eyes spend most of our days looking at the xTerminal (xTerm, xgTerm, uxTerm, or Terminal.app) any relief is always welcome. Unfortunately, the default for the xTerminal (or most applications) is black text on white background which means you are staring at white, i.e., light, most of the time. In addition, your eyes have to constantly adjust between the two extremes of the color spectrum. Hence, even while providing the highest contrast, this color combination tends to strain your eyes. The same is true for light text on dark background, which has been the fad for some web designers these days; please avoid either combination! As far as the eyes are concerned, green/yellow text on a black background (or off-white on dark gray) is the most soothing for the eyes.

As our eyes spend most of our days looking at the xTerminal (xTerm, xgTerm, uxTerm, or Terminal.app) any relief is always welcome. Unfortunately, the default for the xTerminal (or most applications) is black text on white background which means you are staring at white, i.e., light, most of the time.

One way to change the colors on your Mac’s X11 is to add the following lines to your .Xdefaults, which lives in your home directory:

1. When run from inside xterm on your Mac, this command creates a tunnel from the remote machine to your X server. You have to be able to access that machine via ssh, of course, which requires that.
2. To Paste between an X11 app and a Mac OS X app, in the X11 file menu, select Edit Copy and then select Edit Paste in the Mac OS X app menu. X11 Customization and PATH export: To have the scrollbar automatically appear when a new xterm window is created from the X11 menu (and to perhaps source the shell files so that PATH's are kept, etc).
3. The XQuartz project is an open-source effort to develop a version of the X.Org X Window System that runs on OS X. Together with supporting libraries and applications, it forms the X11.app that Apple shipped with OS X versions 10.5 through 10.7.
4. Available options are ansi, dtterm, nsterm, rxvt, vt52, vt100, vt102, xterm, xterm-16color and xterm-256color, which differ from the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) choices by dropping the xterm-color and adding xterm-16color and xterm-256color. These settings do not alter the operation of Terminal, and the xterm settings do not match the behavior of xterm.

Note I changed the cursor and pointer properties as well. If .Xdefaults does not exist in your home directory, feel free to create one. For Terminal.app, you can simply use the GUI preferences; it does not read .Xdefaults.

While you are at it, you might want to change the colors for the ‘ls’ commands as well for two different reasons: (i) the defaults do not work well with your new green-on-black xTerminal and (ii) the right color coding instantly identifies the file type. To change the color coding, first you need to make sure color option is turned on; add the following line to .bashrc for xTerminals or .bash_profile for Terminal.app (or .cshrc for both if you use the C shell)**:

Adding a ‘-F’ flag to the alias will result in a slash (‘/’) after directory names. Then to define the foreground and background colors for eleven different filetypes, you need to redefine the LSCOLORS (LS_COLORS for UNIX) parameter in the .bashrc or .bash_profile:

which specifies eleven sets of colors (11x fb). This results in green filenames, bold-green executables, blue directories, yellow symlinks, and so on (see above screenshot); I prefer not to use a background color for normal filetypes. If you are curious, the eleven filetypes are:

If you want to explore more colors, you will need to use the standard ANSI colors:

Hopefully this provides some respite for your eyes! Remember, you can do the same for emacs (in your .emacs file) and even for gmail!

** Original post had an extraneous error: as John pointed out OS X’s ‘ls’ does not handle the “–color=auto” option.

xterm is a terminal emulator for the X Window System.

The xterm program is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. It provides DEC VT102/VT220 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that can't use the window system directly.

If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.

Xterm For Mac Os X

What's New in This Release:

· increase color pairs value for xterm-256color and xterm-88color to match ncurses, which has an experimental option to support this.· modify ifdef's to make AIX use termios rather than termio; the struct sizes for the two were not the same.· improve CF_WITH_IMAKE_CFLAGS configure macro script for OSMAJORVERSION and OSMINORVERSION values, e.g., for Tru64 and AIX.· modify ifdef to define USE_POSIX_TERMIOS for Darwin (patch by Min Sik Kim).· modify find_utmp() to initialize the whole utmpx struct (except ut_id), since that is needed for OSF1 4.0D to prevent an infinite loop on exit.· add configure check before adding -D_POSIX_SOURCE since some platforms predefine it, e.g., cygwin.· add simplified sed expressions in CF_IMAKE_CFLAGS configure script macro to ensure value for PROJECTROOT is quoted on Solaris, i.e., when nested ( and ) are not interpreted correctly.· correct DEC rectangle operations to reset state after completing the operations.· modify CASE_ST handling in charproc.c to ensure that the parse state is reset even if xterm is not currently processing an OSC or other string (patch by Johnny Billquist forwarded by Matthias Scheler, NetBSD xsrc/29003).· fix OS/2 build for innotek_libc (patch by David Yeo).· fix a regression from patch #197 fix for Debian #277832 which disowned the selection if it was scrolled, e.g., by the user pressing return at the bottom of the screen (Debian #291787).· move the warning/exit for missing $DISPLAY into the error handler in case -display is given, and the connect fails for some other reason.

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