The assignment of the environment variables in ~/.bashrc used in the PS1 prompt and less showed this ordering. The eight common colors are black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white and are numbered from 0 through 7, respectively. Fortunately, modern POSIX terminals don’t suffer from this limitation and many support 256 colors or even more! To keep things simple this post will consider the common case of eight foreground and eight background colors. Note that it is possible that on some ancient terminals only eight colors are available or none other than gray scale (or green or amber). To back up a bit, in the previous post it was left unstated but implied that the Linux console and XTerm terminals traditionally have eight colors available for foreground (text color) and the same eight for background. Desktop theme authors desire to extend their creativity to the Linux console and that is where the trouble begins.

Now themes are not a bad thing as they help to give a desktop a cohesive look across applications. A legitimate question is why would red not be red or magenta not be magenta? In a word, themes. In the previous post about ANSI escape sequences, terminfo, and the tput utility, what I did not mention is that even though a given color such as blue or cyan is requested, it is beyond the program’s control the actual color the user will see.

Uxterm does not change font