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I have a very hard time reading red letters on a black background, a combination that is used frequently by several command line tools that I use on windows.

I can remove the colored output by running color as I learned in https://superuser.com/a/158766/172047. So the price I pay to read the highlighted text is having to remove it's highlighting.

In my case, the problem would be solved if I could tell cmd.exe to use 'light red' instead of plain 'red' (color 0C is readable for me, while color 04 is unreadable). Can this be done?

Red on black screenshot

Update: Thanks for suggesting me to change my background color. I used to have it set to blue, that provides me a slightly better experience when the foreground color is red. Unfortunately, I use some tools that decide to change the background color without asking for my opinion (e.g. some grunt plugins), or that have proven to be hard to use with a blue background. That's why I'd like to just be able to tell windows that 'light-red is the new red'.

Grunt ignoring my background color

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2 Answers2

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I don't believe there is an option of changing the specific text colour called by a program run in Command Prompt as this is set by the programs code.

Your best option would be to change the background colour to something more legible, taking into account this colour, this is done as follows:-

Open Command Prompt and right click anywhere along the top bar, then select Properties.

enter image description here

Navigate to the Colors tab, here you can select a new background colour (even a new text colour), there is a preview here too, so you can adjust it until it is most visible to your specific colour blindness.

enter image description here

Here is an example of a more visible colour, it also makes your shell experience funky fresh!

enter image description here

YetiFiasco
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I was having the same problem with red in my console.

I just discovered that if you change one of the palette colors it stays changed for that entry. So i changed my background to the dark red i could not read and changed it's RGB values to be much brighter. After appyling that I changed the background back to black and the dark red was now much brighter. I hope this helps somebody else, it has caused me al lot of frustration.

Andre van Kammen
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