Is there any terminal or shell that supports alternating row colours for better readability? Commands that output data in table form, for example apt-cache search, is sometimes a bit hard to read, especially for wide terminal windows, and it would be easier if odd-numbered row were slightly differently coloured than even-numbered rows.
Alternating row colours in terminal
shell;terminal
You might want to look for a terminal emulator that supports background image in tiling (i.e. repeated, not scaled/stretched) mode, and create such a background image for yourself.The main drawback is that it won't work if you zoom the terminal, but it could work great if you have a certain favorite font size that you always use.Don't forget about the padding of the terminal. E.g. in case of VTE-based emulators (any many others) there's a default padding of 1px around the whole area of character cells. If your font height is let's say 20px, you should create a 1x40 picture with the topmost pixel being color1, then 20 pixels of color2, then another 19 pixels of color1. This is, of course, assuming the emulator aligns the background image at the top.Among the terminal emulators based on recent version of VTE, Terminix and Xfce4-terminal (version 0.8.x) support background images, you should give them a try to see if they offer this kind of tiling. If not, I'm pretty sure their authors would be open to implementing this (just point them to this page :)). Older versions of VTE used to explicitly support background image, but I don't recommend using that due to plenty of other bugs. Terminology and urxvt are a few other possibilities to try.I used to have a permanent right margin at column 80 using this approach.Update: I've actually tried it with xfce4-terminal and it works kind of as expected. One small drawback I didn't think of is that the background doesn't scroll along with the content when you scroll back, which is especially disturbing with the (IMO otherwise cool) per-pixel scrolling of VTE-0.44.