Emacs’ ANSI-term had some hard to read colors. Text was unreadable.

Attempts:

• Changing them in gnome-terminal preferences had no effect.
• Changing emacs’ theme had no effect.
• Altering the colors for the ls program in .bashrc (or in my case, .zshrc) worked for gnome-terminal, but not for anything in emacs.
• using different terminal emulators had a slight effect, nothing seemingly controllable though.

Solution:

1. M-x customize
2. search term: term color
3. set the term color variables from here. 3a. you can also go into M-x customize-group and search for ansi-color-names-vector and edit the values. some color variables’ are pulled from here.