What should be the colours of Gnome-Terminal?

While clearing out the big pile of emails today, I came across this huge discussion on ubuntu-dev -discuss list about the colours of gnome-terminal. Honestly, I never thought this could be a point of discussion at all , but I was wrong. This article is just a brief summary of that discussion. This might not look of any use but its always good(and a little fun) to know other's opinion about such issues.

Well, lets start with the first mail, complaining about the current gnome-terminal and xterm theme, black text on white background. The guy seemed right with his arguments that historically Linux terminals or command lines in general have always been white text on a black background, KDE still uses them then why not gnome-terminal. I totally agreed with him until I came to know about the term, Ergonomics. I am pretty sure I would have lost most of you here. But carry on, you should know about this stuff.

Ergonomics actually concerns with the study of designing the job, equipment, and workplace to fit the worker(more info on wiki). I knew that gnome guys are crazy about usability but if Ergonomics is the reason for the default theme, then I never really thought that they would go this far to enhance user experience. Hats off to GNOME.

Now, our big question, what should be the colour? seems to be solved. But I still think that people hardly care about what ergonomics says. Common! we are linuxers, we are always curious to find new and better things. Although, I think that gnome devs probably knew that someday, someone will raise a finger on this issue, and so they made the terminal theming highly customizable.

Customizations available in Gnome-Terminal

• Use any possible text colour on any background, say, perky pink on goblin green .
• Your background needn't be a solid colour, it can be an image or even a semi transparent background of any colour.
• You can even create different profiles to manage your themes.

Well, if I were to say my choice of theme, I would go with dark green on black, makes you feel like a H4k3r . Although, now I am happy with the the default theme. Anyway, if you use any of such special or unusual themes, do share. I would like to know about your taste.