Background
If you’re someone who tends to run lots of terminals on different hosts at once, very occasionally, you will find yourself typing a command into the wrong window. This might lead to you, say, rebooting the wrong server, or dropping a table on the wrong database. This is all quite embarrassing, and best avoided.
A common strategy is to give each terminal window a different background colour. This makes it quicker to pick out the window you want, and has the bonus that it's a bit more obvious if you're typing into the wrong one.
People often make themselves a little menu to open new terminal windows on their most-used hosts. They hard code colours into here, hand picking them per host, or maybe using a colour for each application. This doesn't scale too well.
termcolours to the rescue!
It picks a colour for you based on the name of the host, so you
don't have to worry about setting it up every time you install a
new server. It only uses colours that give good contrast against
the foreground text, and uses easy-on-the-eye ANSI colours from the
Tango palette. It always uses the same colour for a given
hostname, so when you're looking over a colleague's
shoulder at a screenshare you get what you expect.
Screenshots
Install
Fedora and derivatives (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.)
sudo dnf copr enable mavit/termcolours sudo dnf install termcolours
From source
Download and unpack, then:
perl Makefile.PL make sudo make install
Lazy option
curl -o ~/.local/bin/termcolours https://bitbucket.org/mavit/termcolours/raw/release/script/termcolours chmod +x ~/.local/bin/termcolours
Usage
echo termcolours >> ~/.bash_profile
For more detail, see the manual.
PuTTY
Additionally, set “Connection → Data → Terminal details → Terminal-type string” to putty-256color.