Making urxvt beautiful
Tags: howtos, software
For a long time, urxvt has been my favourite
terminal application. In the wake of all these theming approaches such as
solarized, I decided to take another look at my
configuration. It turns out that teaching urxvt to use another colour scheme is surprisingly easy.
Personally, I like the Tango colour
palette, so I added the following lines
to my .Xdefault file:
urxvt*foreground: white
urxvt*background: black
*color0: #2E3436
*color1: #a40000
*color2: #4E9A06
*color3: #C4A000
*color4: #3465A4
*color5: #75507B
*color6: #ce5c00
*color7: #babdb9
*color8: #555753
*color9: #EF2929
*color10: #8AE234
*color11: #FCE94F
*color12: #729FCF
*color13: #AD7FA8
*color14: #fcaf3e
*color15: #EEEEEC
To force ls to to coloured listings, I added alias ls='ls --color=auto' to my .zshrc file. As
a final touch, I wanted some transparency for urxvt. Since I am not using a composite window
manager, I settled for the “face” transparency option of urxvt. This required the addition of only
two lines to .Xdefaults:
urxvt*transparent: true
urxvt*shading: 15
Of course, the amount of shading should be customized to your personal preferences. It is surprising how much more I like the command-line now. If you want to use a single theme for all applications, including your window manager, I would suggest looking at the blog of Liang Zan. He really goes the extra mile and customizes every last aspect of his shell and associated programs…