Terminal palettes come in infinite variations. Almost everyone has a “favorite” palette, and if you are like me, you probably hate losing all your finely tuned terminal colors, because you wanted to experiment with this new color scheme and forgot to save your original color profile. The script I’m about to describe can save all color-related information for mate-terminal, and can be easily adapted to work at least for gnome-terminal in GNOME 2.X desktops.
The GUI-Based Way of Saving Profile State
One way to save your current color preferences, along with everything else related to the current terminal profile, is to create a full copy of your mate-terminal profile. This can be done through the “Profiles” dialog of mate-terminal. First you navigate to the “Edit ▸ Profiles” menu entry:
Then you create a new profile, based on your current one:
Profile dialog of mate-terminal
This way you can mess with any of the two profiles, either the original or the new copy, without worrying that you will lose any important settings.
The Scripted Way of Saving Color Settings
The good aspect of having a GUI to save your profile state is that it’s accessible to everyone, and very easy to use. One of the disadvantages is that your settings are all stored in your config database, which also contains a gazillion other options and is not necessarily easy to backup and restore in one step. A simple search for ‘delete your “.config” directory gnome‘ yields many web pages where people recommend deleting the entire ~/.config directory and starting over. This makes me feel rather cautious about depending on always having the full contents of .config around, so I started looking for an alternative way of saving mate-terminal color information: one that I can reliably script myself; one that stores results in a plain text file that I can read easily, fast and with any tool.
So I wrote the shell script shown below. The main idea behind the script is that it should be possible to run a single command and get as output a set of mateconftool-2 commands that will instantly restore my color settings. This way I can save my color profile information by e.g. typing:
mate-terminal-save-colors.sh > terminal-colors.sh
Then if I mess with my color settings, I can just run the resulting script to restore them:
sh terminal-colors.sh
Finding the right mate configuration database keys was not very hard. I originally saw a shell script that tweaks gconf2 database keys when I was experimenting with the solarized color theme for gnome-terminal. There is a nice set of shell scripts and palettes at Github, created by Sigurd Gartmann, that contains a full set of gconf2 keys for gnome-terminal’s color information, as part of its installed scripts. The keys are listed in the set_dark.sh and set_light.sh shell scripts of the gnome-terminal-colors-solarized project.
Adapting the keys and wrapping them in a bit of shell script code, I came up with the following mate-terminal-save-colors.sh script.
Note: The shell script is also available online, as part of my “miscellaneous scripts” collection, at: http://bitbucket.org/keramida/scripts/src/tip/mate-terminal-save-colors.sh.
#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2013, Giorgos Keramidas <gkeramidas@gmail.com>
# All rights reserved.
#
# Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
# modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
# are met:
# 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
# notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
# 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
# notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
# documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
#
# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
# ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
# IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
# ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
# FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
# DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
# OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
# HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
# LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
# OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
# SUCH DAMAGE.
# Dump an executable form of all the mate-terminal keys associated with
# colors. Running the resulting script should restore all color-related
# state of the terminal to whatever it was at the time the script was
# created.
#
# Inspired by:
# The setup scripts of solarized theme for gnome-terminal from:
# https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized
# ----- startup code ---------------------------------------------------
# Save the original program invocation name, and the real path of the
# startup directory, for later use.
progdir=$( cd $(dirname "$0") ; /bin/pwd -P )
progname=$( basename "$0" )
# ----- misc functions -------------------------------------------------
#
# err exitval message
# Display message to stderr and to the logfile, if any, and then
# exit with exitval as the return code of the script.
#
err()
{
exitval=$1
shift
log "$0: ERROR: $*"
exit $exitval
}
#
# warn message
# Display message to stderr and the log file.
#
warn()
{
log "$0: WARNING: $*"
}
#
# info message
# Display informational message to stderr and to the logfile.
#
info()
{
log "$0: INFO: $*"
}
#
# debug message
# Output message to stderr if debug_output_enabled is set to
# 'yes', 'true' or '1'. Please AVOID calling any shell subroutine
# that may recursively call debug().
#
debug()
{
case ${debug_enabled} in
[Yy][Ee][Ss]|[Tt][Rr][Uu][Ee]|[Oo][Nn]|1)
log "$0: DEBUG: $*"
;;
esac
}
#
# log message
# Print a log message to standard error. If ${LOGFILE} is set
# Output message to "${LOGFILE}" if it is set and is writable.
#
log()
{
__timestamp="`date -u '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"
__msg="${__timestamp} [${progname}] -- $*"
echo >&2 "${__msg}" 2>&1
if [ -n "${LOGFILE}" ]; then
echo "${__msg}" >> "${LOGFILE}"
fi
}
# ----- main script body ------------------------------------------------
# The gconf-compatible tool to use for reading and writing gconf keys
# for the MATE desktop, and the application name under /apps/ to
# configure. These are provisionaly set to work for the MATE desktop,
# but they can also be tweaked to work for GNOME 2.X by setting:
#
# conftool='gconftool-2'
# appname='gnome-terminal'
conftool='mateconftool-2'
appname='mate-terminal'
# Basic command-line sanity checking.
if test $# -ne 0 && test $# -ne 1 ; then
echo >&2 "usage: ${progname} [ PROFILE ]"
exit 1
fi
# The name of the profile we are dumping can be passed as a command line
# argument, or auto-detected by peeking at:
# '/apps/${appname}/global/default_profile'
if test $# -eq 1 ; then
profile="$1"
else
key="/apps/${appname}/global/default_profile"
profile=$( ${conftool} --get "${key}" 2>/dev/null )
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
debug "Cannot read configuration key: ${key}"
err 1 "Cannot detect default profile name."
fi
unset key
fi
# Verify that the profile we are looking for really exists, by trying to
# read at least one key from it:
# '/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/foreground_color'
key="/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/foreground_color"
${conftool} --get "${key}" > /dev/null 2>&1
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
debug "Cannot read configuration key: ${key}"
err 1 "Profile ${profile} cannot be found."
fi
unset key
# dumpkey TYPE KEY
# Dump a configuration key to standard output, as a shell command that
# will _set_ it to its current value, using the associated type.
dumpkey()
{
if test $# -ne 2 || test -z "$1" || test -z "$2" ; then
debug "dumpkey() requires exactly 2 non-empty arguments,"
debug "but it was invoked with:"
debug " \"$1\""
debug " \"$2\""
return 1
fi
__type="$1"
__key="$2"
__value=$( ${conftool} --get "${__key}" )
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
err 1 "Cannot read key \"${__key}\""
fi
echo "${conftool} --set --type \"${__type}\"" \
"\"${__key}\" \"${__value}\""
}
dumpkey "string" "/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/background_color"
dumpkey "string" "/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/bold_color"
dumpkey "bool" "/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/bold_color_same_as_fg"
dumpkey "string" "/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/foreground_color"
dumpkey "string" "/apps/${appname}/profiles/${profile}/palette"
Using The Script
Using the script should be pretty easy to discern by now, but here’s a sample run from my laptop:
$ sh mate-terminal-save-colors.sh mateconftool-2 --set --type "string" "/apps/mate-terminal/profiles/Default/background_color" "#000000000000" mateconftool-2 --set --type "string" "/apps/mate-terminal/profiles/Default/bold_color" "#000000000000" mateconftool-2 --set --type "bool" "/apps/mate-terminal/profiles/Default/bold_color_same_as_fg" "true" mateconftool-2 --set --type "string" "/apps/mate-terminal/profiles/Default/foreground_color" "#E8E8E8E8ECEC" mateconftool-2 --set --type "string" "/apps/mate-terminal/profiles/Default/palette" "#000000000000:#D7D700000000:#5F5F87870000:#CFCFA7A70000:#26268B8BD2D2:#ADAD7F7FA8A8:#2A2AB1B1A8A8:#D3D3D7D7CFCF:#555557575353:#DCDC32322F2F:#9595C9C90000:#F5F5D9D90000:#00008787FFFF:#CDCD9F9FC8C8:#4A4AE1E1D8D8:#EEEEEEEEECEC"
The color values are slurped directly from the MATE desktop’s configuration database entries for mate-terminal. Redirecting this output to a plain text file yields a nice, compact sh(1)-compatible script, which restores the colors of the “Default” mate-terminal profile to the values of the script, i.e. the color setup I was using when this color profile was saved:
# Save the current color settings. sh mate-terminal-save-colors.sh > ~/term-colors.sh # Some time later... Restore them once more. sh ~/term-colors.sh
What keramida said... 