Inspired by my previous post on Firefox’s about:blank, I decided to take some time to investigate changing my desktop background colour.
I already know how, using xsetroot. I could just do xsetroot -solid black and be done with it, but because I need to more easily distinguish the background from my terminal windows I want to have an off-black colour of some sort.
xsetroot --help gives no hint as to what the colour names are or how I’d use an RGB code. man xsetroot doesn’t exist, even after installing the “man-pages” package. So. Yay Linux? Ok, I searched around to learn that I can use an RGB like so:
\xsetroot -solid rgb:58/61/43
But screwing around with RGB isn’t exactly fun, so I wanted to find an online list of the named codes and perhaps even an online tool to more easily play with the RGB codes directly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141018090429/http://bitsy.sub-atomic.com:80/~moses/decimalcol.html
I found a more simple list, which also has a program to re-create it. For Unity Linux, your list of named colours is at /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt but others can just search for theirs under /usr somewhere like so:
\find /usr -type f -name 'rgb.txt'
If you’re interested in learning more about colours, there are a number of pages branching off from wikipedia’s list of colo(u)rs.
So what colour have I settled with for my background? I’ll try grey3 for a while.
Keep in mind that this background colour bleeds through into other windows when switching desktops. For example, when switching to a blank desktop and then back to a desktop which has Firefox visible, Firefox will show the window manager decorations and one large blank spot. In that blank spot the background will show, until the inside of Firefox has been completely painted. So it’s quite important to choose a good colour.
