On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 03:05:15PM -0500, Ranjan Maitra via Mutt-users wrote: > Hi, > > So, I like to have my email window to have a light theme and > everything else to have a dark theme (to distinguish things easily > and sort of intuitively). ... > I tried using `xterm -bg "#ffffff" -fg '#000000' -e mutt`` and that > does help some, however, I am not sure if there is a better > preferred way.
Oh yeah. One of the things that seems to have been completely lost on modern desktop environment developers is that the old X programs, xterm included, were customizable IN THE EXTREME, and very easily so. Like most of the programs that came with the original X Window System, xterm relies on "X resources" for configuration. On most modern Linux systems, you can create a file in your home directory called .Xresources, and then define the resources you want for the seemingly infinite configurable properties that xterm has. You might need to call it .Xdefaults on your system; I usually just make a symlink from one to the other just to be safe. For example, I have the following in my .Xresources file: /* color scheme */ XTerm.vt100.foreground: #E0E0C0 XTerm.vt100.background: #303030 XTerm.vt100.titeInhibit: true ! terminal colors 0-15 XTerm.vt100.color0: #000000 XTerm.vt100.color1: #FF0000 XTerm.vt100.color2: #00C000 XTerm.vt100.color3: Yellow XTerm.vt100.color4: #0070FF XTerm.vt100.color5: #B000B0 XTerm.vt100.color6: #00C0E8 XTerm.vt100.color7: #C0C0C0 XTerm.vt100.color8: #808080 XTerm.vt100.color9: #FF2000 XTerm.vt100.color10: #00E000 !XTerm.vt100.color10: #40B040 XTerm.vt100.color11: #FFFF00 XTerm.vt100.color12: #0090FF XTerm.vt100.color13: #C000D0 XTerm.vt100.color14: #00D0FF XTerm.vt100.color15: #FFFFFF This sets the colors I want to use for a dark-themed 16-color xterm. (I don't really use xterm any more just because the world has moved on from Athena, so I don't have a config for the fancy 256-color xterms... but it's the same idea. You just need to sort out the resource names for the colors you want to change.) The first dot-separated part of the resource is the "class" of the resource, in this case XTerm. This is the default xterm resource class, and so it will affect all xterms you start without other command line arguments. But, xterm lets you tell it what resource class you want it to use! This lets you do things like define an entirely different color scheme, by just supplying a single command-line argument to xterm. So, for example, I *also* have this in my .Xresources file: /* brown color scheme */ ! XTerm.vt100.geometry: 80x24+1601+0 brown.vt100.foreground: black brown.vt100.background: #D0C0A8 brown.vt100.titeInhibit: true ! terminal colors 0-15 brown.vt100.color0: black brown.vt100.color1: #A00000 brown.vt100.color2: #005000 brown.vt100.color3: Yellow brown.vt100.color4: DarkBlue brown.vt100.color5: #700070 brown.vt100.color6: #006090 brown.vt100.color7: #848484 brown.vt100.color8: #505050 brown.vt100.color9: #B70000 brown.vt100.color10: #00A000 !XTerm.vt100.color10: #40B040 brown.vt100.color11: #FFFF00 brown.vt100.color12: #0050D0 brown.vt100.color13: #A000A0 brown.vt100.color14: #00B0FF brown.vt100.color15: #FFFFFF Lines that start with '!' are comments--TBH I have no idea why I have color10 commented out in both profiles, but there you go. You can also use C-style comments, as I did at the start of the section. NOTE: I used "brown" here, but I would recommend using a class that is more obviously unlikely to conflict with other programs--but since virtually no one uses Xresources, or programs that use Xresources, any longer, it probably doesn't matter terribly much what you use. With both of those sets of resources defined in my .Xresources, I can get my normal dark color scheme by just starting xterm normally: xterm & Or I can get a brownish-themed xterm by starting it like this: xterm -class brown & Weee! HTH. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
