setterm is a program that sets various characteristics of your terminal (say, each virtual console), such as the keyboard repeat rate, tab stops, and text colors.

Most people use this command to change the colors for each virtual console. In this way, you can tell which virtual console you’re currently looking at based on the text color.

For example, to change the color of the current terminal to white text on a blue background, use the command:

$ setterm -foreground white -background blue

Some programs and actions cause the terminal attributes to be reset to their default values. In order to store the current set of attributes as the default, use:

$ setterm -store

setterm provides many options (most of which you will probably never use). See the setterm(1) manual page or use setterm -help for more information.

If your terminal settings get really messed up (as happens, for example, if you try to look at the contents of a binary file with cat), you can try typing setterm -reset blindly, which should reset your terminal to reasonable settings.