d.background(1)

💖 d.background — the GRASS GIS bestie that paints your whole display 💖

okay so this is d.background(1) from the GRASS GIS User's Manual, and it's literally the glow-up button for your display frame. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

d.background — fills the graphics display frame with a user defined color. that's it. that's the whole job. and she slays at it 💅

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🏷️ KEYWORDS 🏷️

display, graphics, background, fill, erase

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

d.background
d.background --help
d.background color=name  [--help]  [--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

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🎀 Flags 🎀

• --help — prints the usage summary, aka the lil cheat sheet
• --verbose — verbose module output, she's chatty and we love that
• --quiet — quiet module output, she's giving mysterious and silent
• --ui — force launching the GUI dialog, for when you want the fancy window version

🦋 Parameters 🦋

• color=name — required, bestie, no skipping this one
  • Background color
  • either a standard color name or an R:G:B triplet. yes, both. pick your fighter ⭐

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

d.background will fill the image (or like, generally your display monitor) with a single color specified by the color option. one color. the whole thing. iconic behavior honestly.

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⚠️ NOTES ⚠️

ok so important — d.background is a frontend to d.erase and it shares its limitations. namely, it does not work with the wx monitors such as d.mon wx0.

🚨 fr fr, if you're on a wx monitor this thing is not gonna do anything for you. no cap.

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

so in this example, the streets_wake map from the North Carolina sample dataset is displayed with a custom background color (specified using an HTML hex color code) using the cairo display monitor — and that creates a file called map.png:

g.region vector=streets_wake
d.mon cairo
d.background color=#ADEFD1
d.vect map=streets_wake color=#00203F legend_label="Streets"
d.legend.vect -b at=70,30 title="Wake County"

Figure: Wake County street network with custom background color (North Carolina sample dataset)

the way that #ADEFD1 mint background hits with #00203F navy streets?? chef's kiss 🧚

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• d.erase

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Vaclav Petras, NCSU GeoForAll Lab — thank you for your service king 🫡

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💻 SOURCE CODE 💻

Available at: d.background source code (history)

Accessed: Saturday Jan 17 05:41:51 2026

Main index | Display index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

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and that's the whole vibe check, bestie ✨ this was GRASS GIS 8.4.2 Reference Manual energy, running under GRASS 8.4.2, with the copyright reading © 2003-2025 GRASS Development Team — go paint something cute, you got this 💖🌸🦋💅