Solarized with iTerm2

This article was published 6 years ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some concepts may no longer be applicable.

I forget this every time I reinstall my machine, so I think it’s time to document it somewhere.

  • Download Solarized
  • Unzip it and double click on the colour scheme you want (light or dark)
  • Open iTerm2’s preferences.
  • Go to colours, load presets and select Solarized. Make sure that the minimum contrast slider is set to low
  • Click on text, make sure that “Draw bold text in bright colours” is disabled

Done! You should now have a working colour scheme

Thoughts on this post

Kenji Rikitake 2013-06-10

One addition: choose “xterm” for the termcap; do not choose “xterm-256color”.

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Thai Wood 2013-06-30

Thanks for this. I always want to look for the settings under appearance, not profiles>colors

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Rick Yentzer 2013-07-20

“Click on text, make sure that “Draw bold text in bright colours” is disabled” made a big difference in the colors for me with iTerm.

Thanks for the tip!

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aquayee 2013-09-29

Thanks^100 make sure that “Draw bold text in bright colours” is disabled

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leyla 2013-10-08

Many thanks! I’ve been using this with Draw bold text in bright colours on forever, and it looks much better now!

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Alex 2013-11-04

“Make sure that the minimum contrast slider is set to low”. Thank you so much! I’ve gone mad over the weekend trying to figure this out.

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RubeOnRails 2013-11-19

Best tutorial out there for getting this working. Seriously, you should be the number one hit on Google. Thank you!

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Bob Farrell 2016-03-16

Thank you – as with others, “Draw bold text in bright colors” was ruining my day. Didn’t even realise until I was almost ready to submit a bug report to a terminal formatting lib that was displaying all bold colours as grey. Cheers !

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