The default terminal looks good enough if you want to get things done.
But, if you want a unique terminal experience or something that suits your taste, you can also change the color of your Ubuntu terminal.
In this quick tutorial, I shall focus on tweaking the color scheme of the terminal in Ubuntu. Ubuntu uses GNOME Terminal so the steps should be valid for most other distributions using GNOME desktop environment.
Changing the color of your Ubuntu terminal
The steps are similar to how you change the font and size of the terminal. You have to find the option for customizing colors, that’s it.
Let me quickly highlight what you need to go through to find it:
Step 1. Open the terminal window in Ubuntu by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T.
Step 2. Head to the terminal preferences. You can click on the menu button to access the Preferences or right-click anywhere on the terminal screen.
It will be a good idea to create a separate profile for your customization so that the default settings do not change.
Step 3. Now, you can find the options to tweak the font size and style. But, here, you need to head to the “Colors” tab, as shown in the screenshot below.
Step 4. By default, you will notice that it uses colors from the system theme. If you want to blend in with your system theme, that should be the preferred choice.
But, if you want to customize, you need to deselect the option and then start choosing the colors.
As you can notice in the screenshot above, you can choose to use some of the built-in color schemes and also get to customize them to your liking by changing the default color option for the text and background.
You can customize every aspect of the terminal screen color, starting from the texts to the cursor, if you select a “custom” built-in scheme.
Again! Create separate profiles if you want to access different customized versions of the terminal quickly or else you will end up customizing every time you want a specific color combination.
Other ways to change the terminal color
Here are a couple of other ways to change the terminal color in Ubuntu:
Change the theme
Most Ubuntu themes have their own implementation of terminal colors and some of them actually look very nice. Here is how the terminal color scheme is changed for Ant and Orchis themes.
You choose a dark theme and your terminal turns black. No need to wonder about selecting color schemes.
Change terminal color based on your wallpaper
If you do not want to customize the colors of your terminal manually, you can utilize Pywal. With this handy Python tool, you can change the color scheme of your terminal as per your wallpaper.
It will automatically adapt to any of your active wallpapers. So, you do not have to bother customizing the terminal.
More Customization Options for Your Terminal
If you are more of a tinkerer, you would love to know that you have more options to customize the look of the terminal. You can read through our resource on different ways to tweak the look of the terminal to explore more about it.
How do you prefer to customize the terminal? Let me know your experiences in the comments below!
