Dark blue color in vim or ls output in linux

Question

I have a problem with dark-blue color in vim or ls output. Because I'm using black background color, words colored in dark-blue are almost completely invisible. How can I address this problem?

Answer 1

You can modify the color theme of vim with the background option. Use

set background=dark

in your current session or set it permanent in your vimrc.

The output of ls is configured with /etc/DIR_COLORS. See the manpage for more information. The settings can be overwritten with a ~/.dir_colors file in your home directory.

An entry like

 DIR 01;36 

will produce a more readable background with cyan.

Answer 2

If you inform vim that you are using a black background (or otherwise dark theme) it will lighten up all the colors so they are readable:

:set bg=dark

Answer 3

Rather than configure applications to avoid blue on black, I recommend configuring your terminal to make the blue more visible. Most terminal emulators have a setting for that. In xterm, there's an X resource:

XTerm.VT100.color4: CornflowerBlue

In other terminal emulators, look in the configuration file or dialog for color settings or themes.

There is a common control sequence to set the shade associated with a color number from the application: OSC 4 ; c ; spec BEL where OSC is ESC ], c is the color number and spec is a color spec such as #RGB.

printf %b '\e]4;4;#6495ed\a'  # set the blue shade to CornflowerBlue

A change by the application is only effective until the next terminal reset. If you use this method (only recommended if your terminal lacks a configuration mechanism), to make the change effectively persistent, append the color configuration escape sequence to your terminal's reset string (termcap: r1 string; terminfo: rs1 string).

See also Overriding the shade of color displayed, Can I set my local machine's terminal colors to use those of the machine I ssh into?.