13. Colors

All text printed by stumpwm is run through a coloring engine before being displayed. All color commands start with a ‘^’ (caret) character and apply to all text after it.

^0-9: A caret followed by a single digit number changes the foreground color to the specified color. A ‘*’ can be used to specify the normal color. See the color listing below.
^0-90-9: A caret followed by two digits sets the foreground and background color. The first digit refers to the foreground color and the second digit to the background color. A ‘*’ can be used in place of either digit to specify the normal color. See the color listing below.
^B: Turn on bright colors.
^b: Turn off bright colors.
^n: Use the normal background and foreground color.
^R: Reverse the foreground and background colors.
^r: Turn off reverse colors.
^[: Push the current colors onto the color stack. The current colors remain unchanged.
^]: Pop the colors off the color stack.
^^: Print a regular caret.

The default colors are made to resemble the 16 VGA colors and are:

0 black
1 red
2 green
3 yellow
4 blue
5 magenta
6 cyan
7 white

There are only 8 colors by default but 10 available digits. The last two digits are left up to the user. Behind The Scenes Look At Colors for information on customizing colors.

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13.1 Behind The Scenes Look At Colors

Color indexes are stored in *colors* as a list. The default list of colors leave 2 slots for the user to choose. If you’d like to use ‘Papaya Whip’ and ‘Dark Golden Rod 3’ you might eval the following:

(setf *colors* (append *colors*
                       (list "PapayaWhip"
                             "DarkGoldenRod3")))
(update-color-map (current-screen))

Of course, you can change all the colors if you like.

Function: parse-color-string string: parse a color coded string into a list of strings and color codes

Function: uncolorify string: Remove any color markup in STRING

Variable: *colors*: Eight colors by default. You can redefine these to whatever you like and then call (update-color-map).