I Made a Tool for the 47 People Who Customize Their TMS Terminal Colors

Thank me later.

If you don’t know what an AS400 is, this article isn’t for you. Close the tab. Go enjoy your modern tech stack and your dark mode toggle that just works. I’m genuinely happy for you.

For the rest of us — the ones still staring at green-on-black terminal screens in 2024, running logistics software that predates the World Wide Web, manually creating reports from systems that remember the Reagan administration — this one’s for you.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

I work with Trimble TMS. Every day. The terminal emulator has this feature where you can customize your color scheme by editing a .col file. In theory, this means you can make your screen look however you want.

In practice, it means you’re manually converting hex colors to decimal integers, some of which need to be bit-shifted 32 places to the left, then pasting them into a config file and praying.

I wanted Dracula theme. I got a headache.

So I Built a Thing

It’s a color scheme generator. You pick colors, it spits out a valid .col file. That's it. That's the tool.

Features that actually matter:

• Live preview that looks like a real TMS screen
• Presets (Nord, Dracula, Gruvbox, Catppuccin, etc.)
• Automatic decimal conversion (including the cursed background color format)
• WCAG contrast checking so you don’t accidentally make unreadable combinations
• One-click copy to clipboard

You can randomize everything and it’ll generate a coherent palette — weighted toward dark backgrounds because we’re terminal people, not monsters.

Then the Name Generator Happened

Every color scheme needs a name. I figured I’d add a random name generator. Just a fun little feature.

It got out of hand.

The generator now pulls from pools including:

• Corporate dystopia (“Unlimited PTO (Unused)”, “We’re a Family Here”)
• Freight industry trauma (“TONU Tuesday”, “The Trailer Isn’t There”, “Broker Promised What?!”)
• Developer pain (“The Intern Deployed to Prod”, “It’s Always DNS”)
• Passive aggressive email phrases (“Per My Last Email”, “Just Following Up”)
• Philosophy meets IT (“Schrödinger’s Deploy”, “Kafka’s Ticket Queue”)
• Movie parodies (“The Silence of the Lambdas”, “There Will Be Bugs”)
• AS400-specific suffering (“QTEMP of Broken Dreams”, “F24 Is Not a Valid Option”)

These combine through dozens of format patterns. You might get:

• “Fiscally Responsible Segfault at 3 AM”
• “Detention Time: A Cautionary Tale”
• “Lofi Dispatch Beats to Procrastinate To”
• “The 7 Habits of Highly Deprecated Carriers”
• “Achievement Unlocked: Passive-Aggressive Compliance”
• “Schrödinger’s Deploy in the Breakdown Lane”

Is this feature necessary? Absolutely not. Is it the best part? I’ll let you decide.

The Link

Here it is: AS400 TMS Color Generator

Click “Randomize All” a few times. Find a scheme you like. Copy the output. Paste it into your .col file. Squint slightly less at your terminal tomorrow.

Who Is This Actually For?

If you’re reading this and thinking “finally, someone gets it” — you’re my people.

If you’ve ever:

• Explained to a younger coworker what a green screen is
• Debated the merits of amber vs green phosphor
• Had opinions about F-key assignments
• Missed a deadline because the batch job was still running
• Used the phrase “check the BOL” unironically

…then this is for you.

All 47 of you.

The tool is free, the code is visible on CodePen, and yes, you can fork it and add your own name generator entries. I accept pull requests in the form of increasingly unhinged freight industry references.