dynamic-colors

This is a small tool for changing your terminal colors on the fly. This fork supports reading Xcolor style files.

Most work accomplished by sos4nt who did the original version which had a custom theme format.

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 into ~/.dynamic-colors:

    git clone https://github.com/sos4nt/dynamic-colors ~/.dynamic-colors
   

2. To add the tool to your PATH put the following line in your profile (.bashrc/.zshrc/.profile).

    export PATH="$HOME/.dynamic-colors/bin:$PATH"
   

3. If you have a directory where you keep your Xcolor themes, define in in your PATH too (by default they are read from ~/.dynamic-colors/schemes/):

    export DYNAMIC_COLORS_THEMES=~/.custom/xcolors/here/
   

4. 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 visibone

Switch to a next/previous scheme:

dynamic-colors next/previous

Reload last color scheme:

dynamic-colors init

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

Notes

This repository comes with just one Xcolor file for testing purposes.

Notification

If you have notify-send-user the script will notify you of the name of the scheme you switched to.

Key binding example for urxvt

Save this to a file named "urxvt-colors" most likely in ~/.urxvt/ext/share/:

sub on_user_command {
    my ($self, $cmd) = @_;

	    if ($cmd eq 'urxvt-colors:next') {
      $self->cmd_parse(`dynamic-colors next`);
	    }

	    if ($cmd eq 'urxvt-colors:previous') {
      $self->cmd_parse(`dynamic-colors previous`);
	    }
}

Add this to ~/.Xdefaults:

urxvt*perl-ext-common: urxvt-colors
urxvt*perl-lib: [directoy of urxvt-colors]
urxvt.keysym.M-F11: perl:urxvt-colors:next
urxvt.keysym.M-F12: perl:urxvt-colors:previous

Now you can cycle through all color schemes using Alt+F11/12 for example, without closing running console applications.