Articles, Tips, How-To's

Best of CUSM: Linux colors

Personally, I don't like colors in my shell. I think it would be fine as an option, but to have it as the default offends me and many other old Unix hands.

You can shut off command line colorizing by editing /etc/DIR_COLORS and changing "COLOR tty" to "COLOR none" or (less drastically) by removing the "TERM ansi" line from the same file (which removes colorization for ansi but doesn't affect console use).

The shell DEFINITELY shouldn't be attempting colors when the TERM is not "linux". This just makes things worse.

If you hate vi colorization, see Controlling Linux colors in vi (vim)

From - Thu May  4 17:54:32 2000
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From: hlawson@triad.rr.com (Hugh Lawson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,linux.redhat.misc,comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: ls --color command
References: 
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On Thu, 04 May 2000 14:39:47 -0400, C.E.G. <crystal@merlinsoftech.com> 
wrote:
>below is an excerpt from the "ls" man page in regards to the "--color"
>option
>
>when I use this option there *are* colors.  the problem is that they
>are horribly
>eye offending colors.  does anyone know what file I can change in
>order to set
>the defaults of these colors to a more pleasing combination?

Two lines from my ~/.bashrc



eval `dircolors ~/.dir_colors`
alias ls="ls --color=auto"

The command 'dircolors' takes its data from the file ~/.dir_colors and
creates an environment variable LS_COLORS.  The command 'ls --color' takes
its colors from the environmental variable LS_COLORS.

So, write a suitable ~/.dir_colors file, and execute the command
'dircolors'.  To get a starting file for editing, do this:

dircolors -p > ~/.dir_colors

The ~/.dir_colors file so created includes directions on coding the colors
for different kinds of files.

See man dircolors.



-- 
Hugh Lawson
Greensboro, North Carolina
hlawson@triad.rr.com

See also Linux colors

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