Hi there,

First, this request is almost the pure definition of bikeshedding.  I ask for your consideration anyway :-).

When switching to gnome-terminal from xterm, I found that none of the default colour schemes held up to what I consider a truly decent set.

To me, a decent colour set should satisfy these two measures:

  - important: no combination of pale background/foreground is unreadable by having too large a saturation/brightness difference between any colour pair
  - desirable: must preserve the theme and recognizability of the ANSI colour set, so that coloured applications can use names like "Red" and this colour can be recognised by the user

This theme satisfies these conditions, and adds:

  - basic theme: background is a yellowish off-white, foreground off-black
  - nostalgic: all colours bar the off-black derive from a named colour from the classic X11 rgb.txt
  - quirk: add important missing colour (orange) into previously worthless colour position (bright white)

Actually there are still some shortfalls between what xterm colour selection could do and gnome-terminal can.  With XTerm, you can set various text attributes for otherwise uncoloured text (eg, bold, underline, blink, reverse video) to step outside of the colour chart.  It would be nice if gnome-terminal could do that too.

I submit this in the form of X resources for xterm; load via xrdb and then start xterm and run the perl script at the end to show them in action.  I can of course perform the no doubt trivial amount of work to convert this into a patch if required.

--

xterm*color0: #306
xterm*color1:  firebrick
xterm*color2:  chartreuse4
xterm*color3:  darkgoldenrod
xterm*color4:  steelblue4
xterm*color5:  violetred
xterm*color6:  aquamarine4
xterm*color7:  lightyellow2
xterm*color8: grey50
xterm*color9:  orangered2
xterm*color10:  limegreen
xterm*color11:  gold
xterm*color12:  CornflowerBlue
xterm*color13:  hotpink
xterm*color14:  turquoise3
xterm*color15:  DarkOrange

xterm*colorBDMode: true
xterm*colorBD: midnightblue
xterm*colorBLMode: true
xterm*colorBL: slategray3
xterm*colorRVMode: true
xterm*colorRV: snow3
xterm*colorULMode: true
xterm*colorUL: tan2
xterm*dynamicColors: false
xterm*colorAttrMode: false
xterm*AttrMode: false

--

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my %special = ( 0 => "normal",
		1 => "bold",
		4 => "underline",
		5 => "blinking",
		7 => "reverse video",
		8 => "invisible" );

sub ansi {
	return "\e[".join(";", @_)."m";
}

my @colours = qw(Black Red Green Yellow Blue Magenta Cyan White);

print
    join(", ", map { ansi($_).$special{$_}.ansi(0) }
	           sort keys %special), "\n",
    map {
	join("",
	     ansi( 40 + $_ ),
	     join(", ",
		  ( map { ansi( 30 + $_ ). $colours[$_] }    ( 0..7 ) ),
		  ( map { ansi( 1, 30 + $_ ). $colours[$_] } ( 0..7 ) ),
		 ),
	     ansi( 0 ),
	     "\n",
	    ),
	} (0..7);