dynamic-colors

This is a small tool for changing your terminal colors on the fly.

I use it to switch my entire tmux session between Solarized dark and light modes.

Pre-requisites

Your terminal must support the appropriate OSC escape sequences. xterm and urxvt (rxvt-unicode) work fine, whereas Terminal.app and iTerm won't recognize these sequences.

Make sure dynamicColors is enabled in .Xdefaults/.Xresources

xterm*dynamicColors: true
urxvt*dynamicColors: on

Compatibility Check

This changes your terminal background color to red if your terminal supports OCS:

echo -e "\033]11;#ff0000\007"

Setup

1. Clone the repository, e.g:

    cd ~/git
    git clone https://github.com/ceyes/dynamic-colors.git
   

2. Add the tool to your PATH, e.g:

    cd ~/bin
    ln -s ~/git/dynamic-colors/bin/dynamic-colors .
   

3. (optional) For autocompletion add this to your profile (.bashrc/.zshrc/.profile). Change .zsh to .bash for bash environments.

    source $HOME/.dynamic-colors/completions/dynamic-colors.zsh
   

Usage

List available color schemes:

dynamic-colors list

Switch to a color scheme:

dynamic-colors switch solarized-dark

Cycle through color schemes:

dynamic-colors cycle

Reload last color scheme:

dynamic-colors init

Add this line to your profile to always set the last color scheme.

Integration

I'm using the provided color schemes in conjunction with dircolors-solarized and vim-colors-solarized for best results. Always use the dark mode and switch schemes with dynamic-colors switch <colorscheme>

Developing color schemes

Create a new color scheme (will be opened in your default editor):

dynamic-colors create my-color-scheme

Edit an exising color scheme:

dynamic-colors edit my-color-scheme

Check if all colors are defined:

dynamic-colors audit my-color-scheme

Key binding example for urxvt

Save this to a file named "urxvt-colors":

sub on_user_command {
    my ($self, $cmd) = @_;
    my $output = `dynamic-colors cycle`;
    $self->cmd_parse($output);
}

Add this to ~/.Xdefaults:

urxvt*perl-ext-common: urxvt-colors
urxvt*perl-lib: [directoy of urxvt-colors]
urxvt*keysym.F12: perl:urxvt-colors:

Now you can cycle through all color schemes using F12 for example, without closing running console applications.