Colour on the command line

From CLUG Wiki

Contents 1 Colourful prompt 2 Colour-coded ls 3 Colourful manpages (RedHat style) 4 Coloured logging 5 Less with files containing ESC codes 6 Highlighting grep output 7 Colourful vim systax highliting 8 Colourful SPAM in mutt 9 Colourful diff 10 MORE! 11 Table

Colourful prompt

The Bash Prompt HOWTO is a good start with this.

Debian ships with this coloured prompt:

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

Jonathan Hitchcock recommends (well, Stefano added the chroot bit, but otherwise, Jonathan recommends):

# Vhata colour prompt
if [ `/usr/bin/whoami` = 'root' ]; then
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\A/$? \[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\w \$ \[\033[00m\]'
else
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\A/$? \[\033[01;32m\][\u@\h] \[\033[01;34m\]\w \$ \[\033[00m\]'
fi

Colour-coded ls

In your .bashrc (which on a good Debian system is included from .bash_profile), add

# Nice colourful ls (CLUG-Wiki style)
if [ "$TERM" != "dumb" ]; then
  eval "`dircolors -b`"
  alias ls='ls --color=auto'
fi

Colourful manpages (RedHat style)

In your .bashrc (which on a good Debian system is included from .bash_profile), add

# For colourful man pages (CLUG-Wiki style)
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

Coloured logging

$ apt-cache search log | egrep 'colou?r'
grc - generic colouriser for everything
lwatch - A simple log colorizer
ccze - A robust, modular log coloriser
loco - Perl script to add nice colors to your /var/log/messages file

Less with files containing ESC codes

less -R
eg grc cat /var/log/syslog | less -SR

Highlighting grep output

grep --color blah *

Of course, to make this more convenient, put this in your .bashrc

# Colourful grep
alias cgrep='grep --color'

Fill me out with details!

Colourful vim systax highliting

You can make these changes in one of two places:

# vi /etc/vim/vimrc            # Systemwide
or
$ vi ~/.vimrc                  # Personal

Add (or uncomment)

syntax on

If you use a black-background terminal (which you should), also set

set background=dark

Colourful SPAM in mutt

Read Joe's mutt page, for some colourizing.

Colourful diff

Dave Ewart's colordiff, a Perl script wrapper for 'diff' which produces the same output but with pretty 'syntax' highlighting.

MORE!

I want this page to be 2000 screenfulls long, add more, please!

Table

Work in progress...

Multiplication table

×	1	2	3
1	1	2	3
2	2	4	6
3	3	6	9
4	4	8	12
5	5	10	15