Colors, Coding, and Consoles!

Who doesn't like alliteration? After sharing how I got prettify the way I wanted, I thought I'd share some of my other color and font schemes schemes.

Fonts:

When it comes to writing code and consoles, nothing beats monospace fonts in my book. When you're staring at code, a good monospace font can make all the difference. There are a few monospace fonts I love:

• DejaVu Sans Mono (Download) is by far my favorite monospace font that I've ever used and my current font scheme for Console2, Windows CMD (when possible and where Console2 not installed), Notepad++, Linux terminals, and PuTTy. The only two things I'm not overly thrilled about DejaVu Sans Mono is the @ sign and i. I'd rather have the ones from Monaco.


• DejaVu Sans Mono has two sister fonts: Menlo and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I only recently found out about Menlo (while setting up Prettify.js -- see my last article) because it's Mac OS X-only. There is a derivative font of it called Meslo that you can get from GitHub. I've not used it personally. Bitstream Vera doesn't have the same character support of DejaVu Sans Mono, just an FYI. To see a comparison between DejaVu Sans Mono and Menlo, go here


• Monaco is a really nice font and I envy the @ sign and lowercase i from it. Overall I prefer DejaVu Sans Mono, though. It's a good all-around monospace font.


• Anonymous Pro is an upgraded version of Monaco that takes better advantage of ClearType, for those who like it. I keep meaning to give this font a real run-down, but haven't yet. It looks really promising, though.


• Consolas was the first awesome monospace font Windows has shipped. The one problem is that it absolutely has to have ClearType/subpixel rendering to be useable, as without it, the font looks like crap. Be aware of that if you don't like ClearType on while coding.


• Inconsolata is a font based on Consolas. It does a better job at handling being displayed without ClearType/Subpixel rendering, but the @ sign is worse in my book, and it still doesn't do a great job.


• Crystal is another really nice monospace font. I, as with Anonymous Pro, just haven't given it a proper chance.


• Droid Sans Mono is a font from Google created for Android. It's actually a really nice all-around font and I really like it except for one thing: the 0 and O are hard to distinguish since the 0 doesn't have a slash or a dot in the center. If it wasn't for that one thing, I think it'd replace DejaVu Sans Mono as my font of choice. If that doesn't bother you, I highly recommend this font.

Coding:

I do almost all my coding in Notepad++ or in a commandline text editor over SSH. Since I'll include my SSH color schemes in the console section, I will only bother with NotePad++ here.

I personally use a slightly modified version of Obsidian, which is a theme included by default.

First I, naturally changed the font to DejaVu Sans Mono. This is done by going settings-> Style Configurator

I made two changes to the coloring. I manually edited the xml file for the font and changed all instances of fgColor="E0E2E4" to fgColor="BBBBBB". It's a big pain to do this through the style customizor, and much faster to use Notepad++'s "Replace All" functionality after opening up obsidian.xml. The other is I changed the background color to be a bit darker. This can be done in the Style Configurator. Just change the background color to RGB 45,45,45 (#2d2d2d, but you can't use hex). and make sure to check "Enable global background color" (see above). The end result is:

Which I think is very nice. I recently found out about Tomorrow Night Eighties (which I use on here for prettify.js) and Tomorrow Night exists for Notepad++. I've been thinking about modifying it to look like eighties and using it instead of Obsidian, but haven't done so yet.

Consoles

Windows command prompt offers basic changing options.

To change the color right-click the top and select properties, then go to the "Colors" tab.

As you can see, I use a background color of RGB 32,32,32. I use a text color of RGB 187,187,187. The popup text is what you see if you press F7 with the command prompt open. It's the old-school way of pulling up your command history. I never use this, so I never bothered coloring it.

For the font, I use DejaVu Sans Mono as the font when possible. Changing the font to the likes of DejaVu Sans Mono in the native cmd on windows requires a registry edit. Here are some instructions. Note: You don't need to reboot. A simple log-out is sufficient. On Windows 7, you don't even need to do that: just close all open command prompts and when you open a new one, the option to use DejaVu will be available. Reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont]
"000"="DejaVu Sans Mono"

I find that the font cannot be changed if you have certain nonunicode language settings. That was the case to me (Japanese is my nonunicode language).

   

An alternative wrapper for the windows CMD is Console2. I actually recommend Console2 over CMD anyway as it offers many more nice features liked tabbed terminals, can also run powershell, and better resizing and copy/pasting. You can download it from SourceForge, just make sure to download the 64-bit if you use 64-bit Windows. Once again, I use RGB 32,32,32 for the background color and RGB 187,187,187 for the text color and DejaVu Sans Mono for the font. You change the font and font color on Edit->Settings->Appearance. The background color under Edit->Settings->Tabs->Background. I also use the xterm cursor with RGB 164,240,79 as the color.

 Finally there is putty. Putty is a bit of a pain to configure color-wise, because it uses the registry instead of a simple config file.

Anyway, my configuration is as follows (Note: don't forget to save the configuration after making the changes!):

Font = DejaVu Sans Mono , Font size: 10px.
Default Foreground = 187,187,187
Default Bold Foreground = 163,163,163
Default Background = 32,32,32
Default Bold Background = 85,85,85
Cursor Text = 32,32,32
Cursor Colour = 147,199,99
ANSI Black = 28,28,28
ANSI Black Bold = 85,85,85
ANSI Red = 215,85,90
ANSI Red Bold = 223,117,125
ANSI Green = 115,185,115
ANSI Green Bold = 147,199,99
ANSI Yellow = 251,194,0
ANSI Yellow Bold = 225,222,89
ANSI Blue = 103,140,177
ANSI Blue Bold = 124,168,211
ANSI Magenta = 188,122,188
ANSI Magenta Bold = 187,134,223
ANSI Cyan = 91,205,215
ANSI Cyan Bold = 64,150,236
ANSI White = 187,187,187
ANSI White Bold = 215,215,215

End result? It's not perfect, but near close in my book (some of the colors are a bit closer than I'd like, and Cyan is still a bit of a pain):

All in all, I'm pretty happy with my colors and fonts. It makes prolonged use of the console and long coding sessions much more pleasant than the default settings, IMO.