The perfect color scheme for your terminal environment

Tom Deneire
8 min readOct 17, 2024
Photo by Lukas on Unsplash

A few days ago, I decided to invest some time into perfecting the colors of my terminal work environment. Mainly, I wanted to switch from using custom colors for my terminal emulator, Neovim and other applications, to a well-maintained third-party option, so I would not have to worry about this myself anymore. The following is a quick write-up of my experiences and the things I learned along the way.

Terminal emulator

First of all, of course, when exploring different color schemes for the terminal, you need to configure the terminal emulator your using. Most modern emulators, like iTerm, Kitty, Alacritty or Wezterm, have excellent options to either choose a predefined color scheme (if wanted, with select overrides) or to create your own.

Wezterm, for instance, the Rust-based terminal emulator I have been using for the past year, has no less than 1001 built-in schemes!

One of these is Gruvbox Dark (Gogh), which is a classic in the terminal world, and which ended up being the one I chose:

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