Am 28.02.2026 um 07:57 schrieb Fergus Daly via Cygwin:
I am completely drowned by the volume and complexity (and in some cases
antiquity) of responses when googling [variations on]
"xterm color": e.g. multiple references to all of .Xdefaults, .Xresources,
.xinitrc and much much more.
I do not have any of these. Using xterm within Cygwin the file
/etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm seems to serve all required purposes relating
to color. I have (comments # below are not part of the file):
xterm*color3: orange # for selected text using Find/Replace in nano
xterm*color10: darkgreen # for binaries and any *.sh using ls
xterm*color12: blue # for folders using ls
xterm*color13: maroon # for sockets using ls
xterm*color14: brown # for links using ls
xterm*color1: purple # cant find any instances of these 4 being
used but often see them in online examples of XTerm
xterm*color2: tan
xterm*color6: yellow
xterm*color11: red
Question 1 I'm not inclined to mend what isn't broken but do others find this
file and its location a convenient or even a
recommended way to control the palette?
That file is a system-wide default. You are better advised to specify
the same setting in your personal ~/.Xdefaults (and make sure it's
loaded when you run X11, or do it manually with xrdb ~/.Xdefaults).
Well, if you're the only user of a Windows machine with cygwin, it would
not technically matter, but personal user configuration is more portable
anyway.
Question 2 I think there are 16 settings available (xterm*colorNN, 1 to 16) but
nowhere have I been able to find a reference describing
what each controls. Can anybody please point me to such a reference?
It's (almost) all described in `man mintty` and
https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html, where colors 0
to 7 correspond to character attributes SGR 30 to 37 (ESC [ 30 m, etc)
and colors 8 to 15 to SGR 90 to 97.
Question 3 In minty not xterm I get pretty much the same thing (sockets are
shown purple not maroon; selected text in Find/Replace in
nano is shown red not orange), but think this is just coincidental.
I have no idea where mintty in Cygwin (or bash - all different again) get their
colors from. Please can anybody say?
In mintty, you can select a colour scheme in the Options dialog. You can
also install additional themes. Or you can override the individual
colours of the 16 ANSI colour palette in your .minttyrc or mintty config
file, as described in section "ANSI colours" of `man mintty`.
Thank you!
--
Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
