Terminal font colors?

[Bob Goodwin]

Todd Zullinger wrote:
> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>   
>> Bob Goodwin wrote:
>>     
>>> Due to my poor vision I find it best to view the terminal display
>>> with a white text on a black background.  That together with a
>>> larger font works well for me.
>>>
>>> But when I list a directory with "ll" the text is in color with the
>>> directories in a shade of blue that is unreadable against a black
>>> background requiring that I do "ll --color=no" about one hundred
>>> times a day!  Can someone tell me where those colors are set so I
>>> can change the shade of blue.  I can deal with the colors as long
>>> as the text is bright enough, in fact I have come to appreciate the
>>> colored listing, well almost.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> Bob Goodwin
>>>
>>>       
>> /etc/DIR_COLORS
>>     
>
> Actually, for gnome-terminal (and xterm, and likely other X terminal
> programs) /etc/DIR_COLORS.xterm is used.  And this file disables the
> bold attributes that make the colors much more legible on a black
> background.  (IIRC, this has something to do with the default fonts
> and their inability to display bold and utf-8?  I forget where I got
> that idea though, so it may be wildly off-base)
>
> If you check out /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh you can see the various
> files that are read for color settings.  What I've done for a while
> now is copy /etc/DIR_COLORS to ~/.dircolors and then source the
> colorls.sh script (to get the updated colors used without having to
> log out or start a ner terminal):
>
> cp /etc/DIR_COLORS ~/.dircolors
> source /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh
>
> Then an ls in a terminal with a dark background should be much nicer.
> And if you do need to cusomize it, you're doing it with your own
> personal dir colors file instead of the system-wide one.
>
>   
Thanks for the help but in my case it seems things are a bit different 
since I use XFCE rather than Gnome.

What I discovered is that Edit > Preferences > Colors contains a palette 
of available colors and I was able to simply change the dark blue to a 
light shade there to solve my problem. 

Operating on /etc/DIR_COLORS permits me to get some effects like reverse 
video but what I really needed was a brighter text so I set that for 
bold and then in the XFCE terminal preferences I was able to get a 
better color.

Again thank you.

Bob Goodwin