Adding colour schemes for the Xfce-Terminal

Reuben James (ruenoak)

v1.0, 10th September 2025

---

This document describes applying colour themes to the Mousepad text editor. This tutorial is based on Xfce-4.20 on Devuan 6 (Excalibur)

---

Optional

You can use git to download the files used in this tutorial. On Devuan and Deb based distributions open a terminal and type

sudo apt install git

and follow the prompts.

1. Introduction

The Xfce Terminal supports colour schemes which can be installed via an xml file. These can be downloaded, crated from scratch or modified from an existing theme. The Xfce terminal comes with pre install set of colour themes that you can choose from. This tutorial will explain how to download and install a colour theme file.

2. Setup

To prepare your machine, open up your file browser, in Xfce this would be Thunar Either click CTRL H on the keyboard to show hidden files or alternatively you can click 'View - Show Hidden Files'.

Navigate to .local/share, them create folders xfce4/terminal/colorschemes/

We have crated our folders for the installation of the theme file.

3. Installation

For this tutorial we will be downloading the Dracula terminal theme for Xfce. Open your web browser and navigate to the web address below.

select and download the file 'GitHub .zip download' or alternatively you can use git by coping the git url into a terminal, hit Enter and the file with download to your home directory.

git clone https://github.com/dracula/xfce4-terminal.git

Usage

Once you have downloaded the colour scheme, copy and paste the file into the folder you created earlier xfce4/terminal/colorschemes/ Then open or reopen your the Xfce-Terminal application and click Edit - Preferences, click the Color tab. Under Presets select the dropdown and you should see your new theme is now available.

References

---