I wanted to make my xterm a different color, to add spice to my life. After some quick searching, I started working from the directions here.

Of course, there needed to be some modifications. I created a perl script and put it at this path: ~/.randomxterm.pl Not all the colors look good with white text, so I needed to constrain the choices. Also I had to chmod 755 it.

The perl script needs to know the location of the X11 colors. For OSX Yosemite this file appears to be at /opt/X11/share/X11/rgb.txt, and the file looks like this:

255 250 250             snow
248 248 255             ghost white
248 248 255             GhostWhite
245 245 245             white smoke
...

In X11, I then created a new terminal profile, called Color xterm, shown below:

I still get light/pink colored windows, so I should constrain the choices more… but it works well otherwise! Pointless and fun!