Mac Terminal Colors & Git Prompt

I always get slightly annoyed by the default color settings in terminals. Fedora had issues with this for a long time. When I got a Mac, I was rather disappointed to see that with a black background the standard color set was hard to read. Anyway, I dug into setting bash terminal colors and thought I'd share.

To colorize your terminal you need these settings in your shell. I put them in my .bash_profile:

export CLICOLOR=1

export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced

The CLICOLOR flag turns on color, and the LSCOLORS picks the colors for various types of objects in your directory structure. LSCOLORS is slightly different from how it works on linux, as a Mac follows the BSD way. There are 11 color settings concatenated together here, where each is defined by a pair of characters. The first character is text color, and the second is background. Capital is bold or enhanced for backgrounds. The "x" character means default. The color map is a=black, b=red, c=green, d=yellow, e=blue, f=purple, g=cyan, h=white.

The 11 settings, in order, are: directory, symlink, socket, pipe, executeable, block special, character special, executable with setuid, executable with setgid, directory writeable to others with sticky bit, directory writeable to others without sticky bit.

To control colorization of your bash prompt, we'll set the PS1 environment variable. This and other shell output don't use the same color controls as above, but instead use colorizing escape sequences. For example, \033[0;36m is cyan. These aren't very easy to remember, so I create a .colors file (see below) that I source in .bashrc to give nice names to all the colors, so I can say ${cyan} instead of \033[0;36m .

Next I set an alias that will display the colors and give me examples:

alias colors='{

  echo -e -n "${black}black ${Black}Black ${on_white}${BLACK}BLACK$off "

  echo -e -n "${red}red ${Red}Red ${on_yellow}${RED}RED$off "

  echo -e -n "${green}green ${Green}Green ${on_blue}${GREEN}GREEN$off "

  echo -e -n "${yellow}yellow ${Yellow}Yellow ${on_red}${YELLOW}YELLOW$off "

  echo -e -n "${blue}blue ${Blue}Blue ${on_green}${BLUE}BLUE$off "

  echo -e -n "${purple}purple ${Purple}Purple ${on_cyan}${PURPLE}PURPLE$off "

  echo -e -n "${cyan}cyan ${Cyan}Cyan ${on_blue}${CYAN}CYAN$off "

  echo -e -n "${white}white ${White}White ${on_purple}${WHITE}WHITE$off \n"

}'

On my black background, running this looks something like

btaylor@vancouver ~ $ colors

black Black BLACK red Red RED green Green GREEN yellow Yellow YELLOW blue Blue BLUE purple Purple PURPLE cyan Cyan CYAN white White WHITE

You can colorize any output you want. Here's what I do in .bashrc to colorize my bash prompt with git branch awareness. It's a good idea to use big red "PRODUCTION" on production systems.

source ~/.colors

function color_my_prompt {

    local user_and_host="\[${Yellow}\]\u@\h"

    local current_location="\[${Cyan}\]\w"

    local git_branch_color="\[${Red}\]"

    local git_branch='`git branch 2> /dev/null | grep -e ^* | sed -E  s/^\\\\\*\ \(.+\)$/\(\\\\\1\)\ /`'

    local prompt_tail="\[${Purple}\]$"

    local last_color="\[${off}\]"

    export PS1="$user_and_host $current_location $git_branch_color$git_branch$prompt_tail$last_color "

}

color_my_prompt

This will show the git branch in red when I'm in a git repository:

btaylor@vancouver ~/src/cookbook (master) $ 

A couple references that I've adapted to make this: this stackoverflow.com post, and an arch linux wiki entry. Here's my .colors file:

btaylor@vancouver ~ $ cat .colors

# Reset

off='\033[0m'       # Text Reset

# Regular Colors

black='\033[0;30m'        # Black

red='\033[0;31m'          # Red

green='\033[0;32m'        # Green

yellow='\033[0;33m'       # Yellow

blue='\033[0;34m'         # Blue

purple='\033[0;35m'       # Purple

cyan='\033[0;36m'         # Cyan

white='\033[0;37m'        # White

# Bold

Black='\033[1;30m'       # Black

Red='\033[1;31m'         # Red

Green='\033[1;32m'       # Green

Yellow='\033[1;33m'      # Yellow

Blue='\033[1;34m'        # Blue

Purple='\033[1;35m'      # Purple

Cyan='\033[1;36m'        # Cyan

White='\033[1;37m'       # White

# Underline

_black_='\033[4;30m'       # Black

_red_='\033[4;31m'         # Red

_green_='\033[4;32m'       # Green

_yellow_='\033[4;33m'      # Yellow

_blue_='\033[4;34m'        # Blue

_purple_='\033[4;35m'      # Purple

_cyan_='\033[4;36m'        # Cyan

_white_='\033[4;37m'       # White

# Background

on_black='\033[0;40m'       # Black

on_red='\033[0;41m'         # Red

on_green='\033[0;42m'       # Green

on_yellow='\033[0;43m'      # Yellow

on_blue='\033[0;44m'        # Blue

on_purple='\033[0;45m'      # Purple

on_cyan='\033[0;46m'        # Cyan

on_white='\033[0;47m'       # White

# High Intensty

bLACK='\033[0;90m'       # Black

rED='\033[0;91m'         # Red

gREEN='\033[0;92m'       # Green

yELLOW='\033[0;93m'      # Yellow

bLUE='\033[0;94m'        # Blue

pURPLE='\033[0;95m'      # Purple

cYAN='\033[0;96m'        # Cyan

wHITE='\033[0;97m'       # White

# Bold High Intensty

BLACK='\033[1;90m'      # Black

RED='\033[1;91m'        # Red

GREEN='\033[1;92m'      # Green

YELLOW='\033[1;93m'     # Yellow

BLUE='\033[1;94m'       # Blue

PURPLE='\033[1;95m'     # Purple

CYAN='\033[1;96m'       # Cyan

WHITE='\033[1;97m'      # White

# High Intensty backgrounds

on_BLACK='\033[0;100m'   # Black

on_RED='\033[0;101m'     # Red

on_GREEN='\033[0;102m'   # Green

on_YELLOW='\033[0;103m'  # Yellow

on_BLUE='\033[0;104m'    # Blue

on_PURPLE='\033[10;95m'  # Purple

on_CYAN='\033[0;106m'    # Cyan

on_WHITE='\033[0;107m'   # White