How do I get different colors for directories, etc. in iTerm2?

Question

I have a new MacBookPro, and I installed the latest release of iTerm2.

Even after I imported various color schemes, I notice that they just change the color of the text and background only.

What I was expecting to see were different colors for files VS directories, VS hidden files, etc etc. How do I do that on iTerm2?

A related question is how do I actually specify what I want the colors of directories, files, etc to be?

Thanks

Answer 1

You have to do two things:

• set the LSCOLORS environment variable
• create an alias for ls so that it shows colors by default

If you are using Zsh - starting with Catalina it's the default shell, see MacOs Terminal zsh - cannot use ansi. Otherwise for Bash edit ~/.bash_profile and add the following:

export LSCOLORS="EHfxcxdxBxegecabagacad" 

alias ls='ls -lGH'        <-----This shows in list format, follow symlinks colorized

The the colors are set by each bit above; the first being foreground and the second being background. The first two characters refer to directories having a bold blue foreground and a light grey background.

However, there's a great online utility to see what each of the colors mean and look like in real time. It will even generate the "code" for you. (I am not affiliated with this at all). It will work in both MacOS/FreeBSD and Linux. Make sure you select the BSD option for macOS.

LSCOLORS Calculator

---

The order of the attributes are as follows:

1.   directory
2.   symbolic link
3.   socket
4.   pipe
5.   executable
6.   block special
7.   character special
8.   executable with setuid bit set
9.   executable with setgid bit set
10.   directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11.   directory writable to others, without sticky

The color designators are as follows:

a    black
b    red
c    green
d    brown
e    blue
f    magenta
g    cyan
h    light grey
A    bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B    bold red
C    bold green
D    bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E    bold blue
F    bold magenta
G    bold cyan
H    bold light grey; looks like bright white
x    default foreground or background

Answer 2

Open bash_profile using command:

open ~/.bash_profile

and add the following lines:

export PS1="\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ "
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad
alias ls='ls -GFh'

then source bash_profile using:

source ~/.bash_profile

Answer 3

For anyone using zsh, this is what I was able to do on my machine to get it to work:

1. Create the .zshrc file

touch .zshrc

2. Add these to the file

PS1="%{%F{033}%}%n%{%f%}@%{%F{green}%}%m:%{%F{yellow}%}%~%{$%f%}%  "
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad

3. Restart iTerm2

Will produce a terminal that looks like this

I was able to get this thanks to the different answers in this thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/689765/how-can-i-change-the-color-of-my-prompt-in-zsh-different-from-normal-text#2534676

Higly recommend the thread to learn more on how the customizations work

Answer 4

An alternative to LSCOLORS is GRC (the GeneRic Colouriser), which can be used with pretty much any command-line app, not just ls.

If you've got Homebrew installed, install grc with brew install grc - this will set up aliases automatically, including for ls. It comes with aliases and config files for many different commands, and it's (relatively) trivial to hack a config file using Python regular expressions for any command that grc doesn't currently cover (tmutil and launchctl, for example).

(I was going to add this to the question I flagged as a possible dupe, but with your edit it's probably more useful here!)

Answer 5

Since OP asked specifically about iTerm2:

FYI the app now has Solarized color profiles available by default!

Answer 6

If you are using ZSH, you can try Oh My ZSH. If you just want to select from some pre-made themes which have sensible colors instead of manually selecting colors for all the various options for hours on end, Oh My ZSH is a good solution. A single command to install it and it just works.