Colour ls [LWN.net]

Colour ls

Posted Dec 2, 2004 15:16 UTC (Thu) by kael (subscriber, #1599)
In reply to: Colour ls by ewen
Parent article: Debian and the hot babe problem

I actually went to the trouble of turning on comments to make just this point.

There is nothing wrong with color ls. The defaults are bad (BAD), but a couple of minutes reveals how to customize (and improve) the settings and then spread as you will.

One could lump vim in the same basket, same solution applies (I admit to liking the blue color scheme, harking back to the DOS 5.0 edit days).

if ( baby and water ) {
don't_throw_bathwater();
}

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Colour ls

Posted Jan 1, 2005 23:22 UTC (Sat) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

If only the configuration file let you use RGB triplets for specifying
the colors. Instead it takes a raw chunks of extended VT100/ANSI terminal
control sequences. Unfortunately not the entire sequence... just a portion
from the middle. Thus you can only use the basic foreground and background
colors which are quite ugly. The only way to obtain less saturated, less
clashing, and brighter colors is to change your XTerm color settings so
that they no longer match with the specified colors.

If they had been more flexible you could use the builtin color cube for the
foreground and background colors (\033[38;5;`((R*6)+G)*6+B+16`m) or
even use the dynamic color palette. It's possible to query the current
background color so the defaults could be made to look nice so there could
be separate color selections for dark and light backgrounds.

So I agree that in theory color directory listing could be ok, the
implementation (color-ls) sucks. The problem is deeper than the default
color selection.