Solarized: A Must Have Color Scheme For Gnome Terminal, Vim, Gedit And Lots More

WebUpd8 reader Lu Wang sent us an email about a beautiful (and very popular) color theme for various applications called "Solarized".

Solarized comes with both light and dark colorschemes and what makes it so special is that the contrast is "low in lightness but the colors are still well distinguishable due to the different hue values used" says Lu Wang. But that's of not all. Check out the Solarized homepage for a lot more info and screenshots.

There are Solarized color schemes available for many applications: Vim, Emacs, IntelliJ IDEA, Netbeans, Mutt, GIMP and more. Below I'll tell you how to set up Solarized for Gnome Terminal (and Guake) as well as Gedit.


Here are some light/dark Solarized theme screenshots for Gedit and Gnome Terminal:

Set up Solarized for Gnome Terminal and Guake

To install GIT and get a `fix` for "ls", open a terminal and copy/paste the following commands:

sudo apt-get install git-core
cd
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/seebi/solarized/raw/989a67d68e1a35d130d4afe6299b5f1c0d5c9122/ls-colors-solarized/dircolors
mv dircolors .dircolors
eval `dircolors ~/.dircolors`

Then, set up Solarized for GNOME Terminal:

git clone https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.git
cd gnome-terminal-colors-solarized

And now you can set it to light or dark using the following commands:

./set_dark.sh
./set_light.sh

And for Guake:

cd
git clone https://github.com/coolwanglu/guake-colors-solarized.git
cd guake-colors-solarized

And use ./set_light.sh and ./set_dark.sh to set the color scheme.

Note: for Gnome Terminal in Ubuntu 11.04, I've also had to edit some settings to remove the transparency: Edit > Profile Preferences, on the "Background" tab uncheck "Use background settings from system theme" and then select "Solid color".

Solarized for Gedit

The (unofficial yet) Solarized Gedit themes are still work in progress but you can install them already. Download Solarized for Gedit: light | dark

To install them, in Gedit select Edit > Preferences, go to the "Fonts & Colors" tab, select "Add" and browse for the light/dark Solarized themes you've downloaded.

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Update: There's another Solarized color scheme for Gedit HERE which uses more orange (it basically uses the same colors but differently) so check out this one too. Here's how the Gedit Solarized alternative looks:

Links

Want Solarized color schemes for other applications? Check out the links below:

• Homepage：http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
• Main git repository: vim, emacs, mutt, gimp palette, Xresources: https://github.com/altercation/solarized
• Siguradga's fork: gnome-terminal: https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized
• Seebi's fork: dircolors, tmux: https://github.com/seebi/solarized
• Lu Wang's fork: Guake: https://github.com/coolwanglu/guake-colors-solarized

Many thanks to Lu Wang for the info!

Yakuake (Quake-Like Terminal Emulator) 2.9.8 Finally Adds KWin Support

Yakuake is a very cool Quake-like drop-down terminal emulator for KDE. If you've never seen Yakuake in action before, check out the following video which I've just recorded with Yakuake 2.9.8 in KDE SC 4.6:

A new Yakuake version was released yesterday (2.9.8) which finally brings support for KWin for handling its window animation (via OpenGL). The new version also comes with keyboard shortcuts to grow terminals in any diretcion and minor bug fixes.

If you're using Ubuntu (Kubuntu) 10.10 and you have installed the latest KDE 4.6, you can install Yakuake 2.9.8 (only works with KDE 4.6+) from a PPA using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:msb/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yakuake

If you're not using KDE, you can use Guake instead of Yakuake. If you want split terminals (and other features) too, check out this how-to: How To Get A Quake Like Terminal Under Gnome Using Terminator.