Is there a way to alter the colors used in TTY consoles on Linux?

Question

By "alter colors", I mean something like change black from #000000 to #111111, and by "TTY console", I mean what you get when you do Ctrl+Alt+F1 from X11, not a terminal emulator like xterm or urxvt.

I'm using Arch Linux, but I think it has more to do with the program providing the TTY (agetty, I think).

Chris Kempson · Answer 1 · 2012-06-13T20:05:34.187

This is entirely possible and is something I do on my Arch setup.

You could drop something like this in a shell script and have it run at login:

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    echo -en "\e]P0151515" # Black
    echo -en "\e]P1ac4142" # Red
    ...
    echo -en "\e]PEac4142" # Bright Cyan
    echo -en "\e]PFac4142" # Bright White
    clear # Clear artifacts
fi

The \e]P0 to \e]PF (base 16) are the escape sequences you need to set the 16 (8 half bright, 8 bright) colours. After which you put your desired replacement colour e.g. 151515.

h0tw1r3 · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-23T19:50:58.293

5

The setterm command is what you're looking for.

setterm -foreground black -background white

EDIT

No, there is no way to alter the names of the colors as you requested. They are not referenced that way anywhere in curses, terminfo, or the terminal itself. You could change the definitions of the color indexes (0-15 i think) by editing the kernel source and recompiling.

edited Jul 23 '11 at 19:50

answered Jul 23 '11 at 05:53

h0tw1r3

1,914

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 02 '20 at 03:29

3

This is the best command I know of:

setterm -clear all -foreground green -bold -store

You can only have 8 different color as far as I can tell. Maybe some more by using bright in front of basic 8?

edited Mar 02 '20 at 03:29

Giacomo1968

58,727

answered Jul 24 '13 at 21:58

Shubham Chaudhary

3,537

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 15 '22 at 16:01

How an extra addition: the current valid answer about

setterm -foreground black -background white

is valid and works, it has one advantage, it allows customize any color you like, the disadvantage is that is temporal, if you run either htop or w3m <url> and exit, then the tty returns to the original setting.

if you use (according with man setterm)

setterm --inversescreen [on|off]

it applies an inversion of colors between foreground and background from white/black to black/white respectively. The advantage is that is permanent, you can run either htop or w3m <url> and exit, then the tty keeps the inverted setting yet. The disadvantage is that the colors can't be customized - it means white and black are always used

Is there a way to alter the colors used in TTY consoles on Linux?

4 Answers4