How to exclude a color from git's graphColors?

Question

I'd like to customize the colors used in git log --graph via log.graphColors. Basically, I need to keep the default colors, just exclude the blue color as it's barely readable in my terminal. What would be the cleanest way to do that?

Answer 1

This is the original colorset:

red,green,yellow,blue,magenta,cyan,bold red,bold green,bold yellow,bold blue,bold magenta,bold cyan

You can skip the blue and set this in your .gitconfig file:

[log]
    graphColors = red,green,yellow,magenta,cyan,bold red,bold green,bold yellow,bold magenta,bold cyan

Answer 2

Unfortunately there is currently no way of getting the default values of git configuration variables (See this answer for more information and links).

A thing you could check/try:

• Is your terminal changing the colors?

  It could be that the ANSI color escape sequence blue does not appear blue in your terminal. An easy way to check this might be to use

  # set current branch color to blue
  git config color.branch.current blue
  git branch
  # check the color of the branch and then reset it
  git config --unset color.branch.current
  # or to try colors more genaral (note the quotes)
  git config color.branch.current '[<attribute>,..] <color> <color>'
  git branch
  

  <attribute>s available bold, dim, ul, blink, reverse, italic, and strike. Special note here about bold as for example iTerm2 uses the color specified in the bright column (in the colors settings tab) for bold colors

  <color>s available normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. First is foreground-, second is background-color

  If yes: Find out how to change the color in your terminal

• Set the option with a list of colors you like (omitting blue) and enjoy

I hope that you found a satisfying solution, or at least something interesting to read.

Answer 3

In Konsole, you can simply adjust the color scheme in your profile to make the blue color slightly lighter. Go to Settings > Edit current profile... > Appearance. Once there, select your color theme and edit it to your preference.

This will fix the issue not only for git, but any other terminal app that uses colored output.