Customizing your terminal

The default settings for the terminal program that come with most linux distro's is pretty plain. For most it is a white screen with ugly black lettering. Some people like this retro look and eschew so called "eyecandy" but one of the first things I do after installing linux is to customize the terminal to look the way I want it. How you do this can vary a bit depending on which terminal program you are using. in KDE's konsole the settings you modify are known as schema. In Gnome terminal you edit profiles. I will give you a step by step on modifying the gnome terminal.

First lets get rid of that nasty 2 color terminal that looks like a throwback to computing circa 1972.
On the terminal program menu click Edit then Profiles. From the Profiles list you most likely will only have the one named Default. Click on it then click Edit. A new window pops up, Across the top of that window are tabs, click on the one that says Effects. Here are 3 options for background settings. None, Background Image, or Transparent background. Click on Transparent background. You will notice a slider. This controls the amount of transparency. Don't bother adjusting it just yet. Since gnome has a default color scheme of black letters on white background. The color you are mixing with transparency is now white. This looks terrible. So click on the Colors tab. If "use colors from system theme" is checked then uncheck it. Now click on the button next to Text color:. It will bring up a color wheel and the little selector circle is on the darkest end of the color spectrum. Click on the corner of the triangle that is the whitest. It may take a little practice but eventually you will click the very end of that triangle and get pure white. Click ok and now click on the button labeled Background color:. We want to set that color to black. You could set it to another color that is pretty dark but you will run into troubles with transparency at some point if you do. Say if you pick dark blue, on a green wallpaper it will look fine but change the wallpaper to something mostly red or yellow and you will get a totally unintended look. So for now stay with black. Go back to the effects tab now and crank the transparency slider right and left until you geta a bit of your wallpaper showing through but not so much that you can't read the text in the terminal.

What else can you customize? Under scrolling you can change the size of the scrollback buffer. By default it is set to 500 lines. I like mine a bit bigger and usually change this to 1000. Under general you can choose to turn off the terminal bell. Do this if you are using the computer late at night and don't want to disturb others. Also under general is the font selection. I like this set to bitstream vera sans or sans mono at size 12-14. Play with this until you get the font and size you like. Also under colors, one change the color palette used by terminal programs. This makes a big difference to ncurses programs. You can finally tweak that nasty bright red on dark blue background that so many of them use.

Now that we have tweaked the terminals colors, fonts and transparency we need to add the finishing touch by modifying the behavior of bash itself. Bash is the shell environment that you interact with when typing on the terminal. It is analogous to the command prompt in MS Windows. Learning all the tricks to modify the bash prompt is a bit much to take on here so look below for links to more info but I will show you a few basics.

The first thing I like to modify is the way the command prompt appears. If no modification is done it will appear as just Bash$. That seems pretty uninformative to me. I prefer to have a little more info such as my login name, machine name and current directory. I also like to have this colorized a bit to match my terminal colors. we can do both things at once. Settings for this are stored in a hidden file in your home directory called .bashrc so if you open that file in your favorite text editor look for a line that starts out export PS1= put a # in front of it to keep it from being used and add a new line like this.
export PS1="\[\e[36;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\]@\[\e[32;1m\]\h\[\e[33;1m\]:\W> \[\e[0m\]"
Save your file, close and reopen your terminal. Now it should look like the image below.



If you want to know more about customizing the bash prompt try this howto article