Setting the colors for cssh terminals

I’ve advocated the use of cssh before so I thought I would add a quick tip on how to make it more visually appealing. On my Ubuntu 7.10 system the default colors where black text on a white background which I find much more difficult to use than the reverse. It took a bit of research and digging into the man page for xterm to find a good solution.

The easy way to change the foreground and background colors are to add a line like this to the ~/.cssrc file:

terminal_args=-fg White -bg Black

Alternatively you can follow the instructions at “Clusterssh” which involves setting a class to cssh terminal windows and assigning their colors in ~/.Xdefaults.