OS X Terminal Customization - Colors

I like to use colors on my terminals. I color my prompts both to separate out the different pieces of information--such as whether I'm root and to make the path distinct from the username--and to separate multiple commands so I can easily see where the output of one ends and the output of the next begins--which is really helpful when tailing a lot of log files. I also like to have a dark background with slight transparency. So I set things up and color is nicely supported, I brought in my standard .zshrc, and now I have colored prompts and listings on a black background.

However, the blues are just too dark. It is hard to read them on the black background, especially with transparency. No problem, I'll just change them. The option has to be in there with the other color options, right?

After about five minutes of going through options for the terminal I'm still having no luck. The window preferences and general preferences both seem to not have options for changing the text color. You can change the background, the highlighting, and the default text color, but not which shade of blue or red to use.

It took some creative searching on Google to finally find this page. Apparently the Show Colors option doesn't toggle colors on and off as I expected, but rather gives you a color palette. Once you have the color palette you can set colors by dragging colors from the palette onto the text, and yes you have to hit the right pixels. So in order to set all the colors you have to have text with that code visible on the screen, open the color pallet, find the color you want to change to, and then drag the color onto the text, which is hard for the non-bold texts. In the end I guess it works, but what a pain! Oh wait, what's this? It doesn't save your changes. Even saving a .term file and reloading it doesn't work. Apparently these changes aren't covered in Terminal.app so it doesn't know to save them. With no option on the color picker to change them you're stuck changing them every time.

I'm often amazed at how rough the interior of OS X is despite its polished exterior. Even PuTTY lets you change colors.

If someone knows a way to change these permanently without hacking the program, please let me know.