OS X terminal.app selection color when window inactive

Question

I am using a solarized color scheme in terminal.app. When I select text it looks great, and I am able to change the color of the selection in the preferences.

But when I move focus to another window the selection color changes to this:

Bad color

Good color

How do I make it so it doesn't change, or at least control what color it changes to?

Answer 1

I was unable to find a way to prevent it from changing colors, or setting it to a specific color. However, the Opacity setting for section effects the color when the window is inactive. I went with 0080FF and 53% for selection color (not the standard in solarized, but I preferred it). With the default solarized background color, a highlight of any color that has an opacity of > ~50% ends up being unreadable.

Answer 2

I was wondering the same thing, and spent some time playing with Terminal today. It seems that the text selection colour for an unfocused Terminal window is actually derived from the background colour set for that window.

Try this: open up the Profiles tab in the terminal settings window, double click on a profile you don't use to open a new Terminal with that profile, and then switch to the 'Window' sub-tab in the settings. Here you can set the background colour. If you select some text in your new Terminal window, and drag the background colour slider around (ensure that the Terminal window has lost focus), you'll see that the colour of the selection highlight changes also.

Specifically, it seems that there is a cutoff at "45% brightness" or so. For background colours lighter than this the selection colour is a darkened version of the background, and for background colours darker than this the selection colour is lightened.

Ultimately this is a disappointing discovery; it means that we can't control the text highlight colour in unfocused windows directly! In particular this is bad news for Solarized inspired designs, because the legibility of the text depends on the carefully chosen contrast balance between the text colour, and the light and dark background/selection colours.

For reference, here are the colours I'm running with in my modified Solarized Dark theme:

• Text colour: #90A6A9
• Selection colour: #EEE8D5
• Background colour: #021319