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!

How To Get A Quake Like Terminal Under Gnome Using Terminator

I am aware of Guake (Gnome), Yakuake (KDE) and so on, but this post is about using drop-down grid terminals using Terminator. Read on!

I used to love Yakuake - a drop-down terminal which will remind you of the Quake console - and used it for about an year but then I decided not to install any KDE libraries in Gnome so I switched to Guake. Guake is nice but you can't have multiple terminals in one window and lacks a lot of the customization that was available for Yakuake.

Terminator on the other hand supports multiple terminals in one window, has tabs support, you can save your own custom layouts, has a built-in "watch terminals for activity" option and supports many other customizations but you can't use it as a drop-down terminal, Quake-style. By default that is, because you can actually do this using the Compiz "Widget Layer" plugin.

Here is a video demonstrating how to configure Terminator to use the Widget Layer Compiz plugin and of course, see the actual Terminator using Widget Layer in action (the how-to result is displayed later on in the video, so watch it till the end):

(Watch it in HD!)

And here is the detailed info on how to do it:


1. Install Terminator

The latest Terminator version is available in the Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat official repositories. For older Ubuntu versions, install Terminator from its PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-terminator/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install terminator

2. Install CompizConfig Settings Manager and Extra plugins:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-extra

If you didn't have the "compiz-fusion-plugins-extra" package already installed, you may need to log out and log back in (according to Mikael Orrebo - see the comments).

3. Go to System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager, scroll down to the "Widget Layer" plugin and on the "Behavior" tab, under "Widget Windows", enter:

class=Terminator

Then of course, enable the "Widget Layer" plugin.

4. Still under the "Widget Layer" settings, on the first tab ("General"), select the keyboard shortcut (you can select "F12", just like with Yakuake or Guake) to activate the Widget Layer and optionally a window corner to trigger it.

You can tweak some other stuff for the Widget Layer Compiz plugin: on the "Appearance" tab, you can set the "Background brightness" to 100% and then when you trigger the Terminator Widget Layer, there won't be a dark background around Terminator anymore; on the "Behavior" tab, if you uncheck the "End Widget Mode On Click", Terminator won't hide when you click outside its window anymore.

5. Launch Terminator (Applications > Accessories > Terminator), move it to the position where you want it to start, create horizontal / vertical terminals and also check whatever options you want Terminator to use when started (I've unchecked the "Window borders" option so my Terminator doesn't have window borders  for instance), then in the Terminator preferences, on the "Layouts" tab, click the "Add" button and enter a name for the layout you've just created. I've used "widgetlayer" for the layout name".

6. Close Terminator, press ALT + F2 and launch it using the following command:

terminator -b --layout=widgetlayer

Note that "widgetlayer" is the name I've used for my layout under step 5 - if you've used a different name, adjust the above command accordingly.

7. Now you'll have to add the above command to your startup applications so it launches Terminator with the new layout we've created, each time you log in. To do this, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications, click "Add", under "Name" enter "Terminator" and under "Command", enter:

terminator -b --layout=widgetlayer

Again, replace "widgetlayer" with the name of the layout you've created in step 5.

How To Adjust Guake Terminal Width

Guake is a Quake like terminal for Gnome. While Yakuake is a lot more customizable and comes with some nice options such as split view (like Terminator), people don't usually like installing KDE applications under GNOME so if you're using GNOME, you're stuck with Guake (or some other alternatives such as Tilda). Further more, I tried the latest Yakuake in GNOME (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx) and it was very laggy (I'm not sure if it's the same in KDE too) so I'll stick with Guake for now.

One thing Guake lacks is customization: you can't adjust the terminal width for instance which is something I was really missing because having a terminal as wide a large monitor is useless. But since it's written in Python, you can adjust Guake's width by editing a file. Here is how.

Before editing the file, make a backup:

cp /usr/lib/guake/guake.py ~/Desktop/

In case you want to restore the default values, simply copy the guake.py file from your Desktop back to the /usr/lib/guake/ folder.

Now, to modify Guake's width, paste this in a terminal:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/guake/guake.py

Then scroll down to line 789 (it's on line 817 in Natty), which says "width = 100" - this is how it looks:

screen = self.window.get_screen()
height = self.client.get_int(KEY('/general/window_height'))
width = 100
halignment = self.client.get_int(KEY('/general/window_halignment'))

And modify the width value (percentage) to whatever you want. By default, Guake is centered but you can also modify its alignment by editing line 801 (829 in Natty) which looks like this: "if halignment == ALIGN_CENTER:" and replacing "CENTER" with "LEFT" or "RIGHT".

Many thanks to rhigmus @ Ubuntuforums for the heads up!