Color Themes for Windows Console

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Now that I've been using the new solarized themes for Leo, I wanted to use them for the Windows console, too.  It turns out that the Windows terminal group has developed a tool to set other color themes for the console.  There is a link on this page:

ColorTool

You unzip the zip file.  There will be the colortool executable and a schemes folder with some color schemes, including a light and dark solarized scheme.  These are the real thing, using the real published solarized colors.

You run the tool with the name of the scheme, e.g.

ColorTool.exe schemes\solarized_dark.itermcolors

You will get a window with a whole lot of colors.  Don't worry, it is only showing the various colors it uses.  You can clear the screen with the cls command if you like.

The new color scheme will stick until you set a new one or change some color(s) in the Properties dialog.

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Hmm, I thought that all console windows would use the new scheme, but maybe not.  You might have to invoke the command for each one.  That shouldn't be very hard - a batch file or doskey command would do it.

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Here's a doskey macro to set a console to solarized dark (the Colortool directory is in c:\utility) (all on one line):

doskey solardark=C:\utility\ColorTool\ColorTool.exe C:\utility\ColorTool\schemes\solarized_dark.itermcolors ^& cls

If you haven't used the doskey command before,  I keep the aliases (called "macros") in a batch file called aliases.cmd.  I usually start a console with the command cmd /k aliases.  This loads all the aliases.  One of mine is named ea (Edit Aliases) and it loads the aliases into my text editor so I can easily add a new one.

With this scheme, you can open a console, type solardark, and you are ready to go.  Or you can just use a pair of batch files.