If you don't know what X resources are, you can see what yours are currently set to with xrdb -query and set it just by putting stuff into the standard input of xrdb alone.

I don't really have any "tricks", but I've just set the font, size, disabled the scrollbar for urxvt and remapped all the standard 16 colors. Also despite some terminals defaulting to white backgrounds it seems that dark backgrounds are actually considered to be more of a standard for some reason. Which is probably why you get things sending you white text, just assuming you'll have a dark background that it'll show up on.

>>3
>but I've just set the font, size, disabled the scrollbar for urxvt and remapped all the standard 16 colors
Post it!
>it seems that dark backgrounds are actually considered to be more of a standard for some reason
Probably IBM PC and DOS users being in charge of picking colors. But exactly that, yes.

>>4
https://paste.pound-python.org/show/c6ptRBW8R8mPDMQI3RaT/
Like I said, it's really plain. The only thing interesting about it is I spent quite a while trying to choose colors that contrasted as much as possible, so any color could be read on any background. It's a lot harder than you'd think.
It could probably still use some tweaking but every time you get one combination right it ruins 2 others. Also I still need to work on the brights.

>>3
>>4
It comes from the way that the oldschool dedicated terminals worked. Most of them only illuminated the text because 1=on and 0=off, so it follows that 1 should be used for illuminated pixels and 0 should be used for pixels that aren't.

Doing it the other way, having 1=off or ink and 0=on or paper, didn't show up until somewhere around the 80s as computers began entering the home, where the paper metaphor made more sense