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how do i get the mac terminal to display colors? i.e. in fedora when i use ls it color codes the results based on if it's a file or folder. similar results on mac?

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Edited question, since the answers suggest the problem is ls specific. – Daniel Beck Jan 13 '11 at 6:30
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Can you provide examples other than ls which you'd like to have colorized and in what way? There are various colorizers that can be used in pipelines to highlight text based on regexes either in config files or on the command line. – Dennis Williamson Jan 13 '11 at 16:57
in VI or VIM, especially in syntax coloring – tekknolagi Jan 14 '11 at 0:30
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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

You can change your shell colors in Terminal's preferences.

alt text

With these settings, you get these colors (not usually using colored ls, so I don't care):

alt text

I don't understand what the issue is here. Colored command output is active by default. The only thing you can/need to do yourself is give normal and bold text different default colors, and actually use the colored variants (e.g. ls -G) of your commands.

For vim: :syntax on in vim. Or append syntax on to .vimrc.

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display ANSI colors? – tekknolagi Jan 14 '11 at 0:29
@tekknolagi This option enables colored output e.g. of ls -G. Toggle it with a Terminal window open to see the effect. You can also select different default colors for regular and bold text. – Daniel Beck Jan 14 '11 at 8:32
awesome @Daniel! thanks – tekknolagi Jan 14 '11 at 15:35
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up vote 4 down vote

Add, these lines to the end of your ~/.bash_profile

alias ls='ls -G'
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=Gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad

As you can see, customizing them is a bit of a pain, but there's a website that helps with that... http://geoff.greer.fm/lscolors/

Now when you open the Terminal it will have colors in ls

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do i have to do that for every single command i want? – tekknolagi Jan 13 '11 at 5:27
No, your ~/.bash_profile is used to add settings to your Terminal sessions, it is loaded every time a Terminal window is shown. It's a text file, you just add those lines to the end, and save it. Then start up Terminal, or restart it, and your settings are active. – slomojo Jan 13 '11 at 5:36
not what i meant. if i want to color code other commands – tekknolagi Jan 13 '11 at 6:31
i am very familiar with the bash profile – tekknolagi Jan 13 '11 at 6:34
Only if they have their own color profile, which commands are you interested in? – slomojo Jan 13 '11 at 20:12
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up vote 2 down vote

Use the -G switch to ls on Mac:

ls -G

If you'd like the standard ls to always be colored, add this to your ~/.bash_profile:

alias ls='ls -G'
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