Prompt colours

Now, I have set up my .bashrc and .bash_profile and I have colourful output in my terminal. I decided to customize things a just little bit more…

As a start, I copied the default colour scheme /etc/DIR_COLORS as ~/.dir_colors. I edited to my liking, for example, I do not want coloured files to be in bold.

Here it is (it’s long!):

# Configuration file for dircolors, a utility to help you set the
# LS_COLORS environment variable used by GNU ls with the --color option.

# The keywords COLOR, OPTIONS, and EIGHTBIT (honored by the
# slackware version of dircolors) are recognized but ignored.
# (see the scripts in /etc/profile.d/coreutils-dircolors.* to change default
# options in the Slackware aliases)

# Below, there should be one TERM entry for each termtype that is colorizable
TERM Eterm
TERM ansi
TERM color-xterm
TERM con132x25
TERM con132x30
TERM con132x43
TERM con132x60
TERM con80x25
TERM con80x28
TERM con80x30
TERM con80x43
TERM con80x50
TERM con80x60
TERM cons25
TERM console
TERM cygwin
TERM dtterm
TERM eterm-color
TERM gnome
TERM gnome-256color
TERM jfbterm
TERM konsole
TERM kterm
TERM linux
TERM linux-c
TERM mach-color
TERM mlterm
TERM putty
TERM rxvt
TERM rxvt-256color
TERM rxvt-cygwin
TERM rxvt-cygwin-native
TERM rxvt-unicode
TERM rxvt-unicode-256color
TERM rxvt-unicode256
TERM screen
TERM screen-256color
TERM screen-256color-bce
TERM screen-bce
TERM screen-w
TERM screen.linux
TERM screen.rxvt
TERM terminator
TERM vt100
TERM xterm
TERM xterm-16color
TERM xterm-256color
TERM xterm-88color
TERM xterm-color
TERM xterm-debian

# Below are the color init strings for the basic file types. A color init
# string consists of one or more of the following numeric codes:
# Attribute codes:
# 00=none 01=bold 04=underscore 05=blink 07=reverse 08=concealed
# Text color codes:
# 30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white
# Background color codes:
# 40=black 41=red 42=green 43=yellow 44=blue 45=magenta 46=cyan 47=white
NORMAL 00      # global default, although everything should be something.
FILE 00        # normal file
# RESET 0        # reset to "normal" color
DIR 01;34      # directory
LINK 00;36     # symbolic link. (If you set this to 'target' instead of a
               # numerical value, the color is as for the file pointed to.)
# HARDLINK 44;37  # regular file with more than one link
FIFO 40;33     # pipe
SOCK 00;35     # socket
DOOR 00;35     # door
BLK 40;33;01   # block device driver
CHR 40;33;01   # character device driver
ORPHAN 40;31;01 # symlink to nonexistent file
SETUID 37;41   # file that is setuid (u+s)
SETGID 30;43   # file that is setgid (g+s)
CAPABILITY 30;41        # file with capability
STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE 30;42 # dir that is sticky and other-writable (+t,o+w)
OTHER_WRITABLE 34;42 # dir that is other-writable (o+w) and not sticky
STICKY 37;44   # dir with the sticky bit set (+t) and not other-writable
EXEC 00;32     # This is for files with execute permission:

# List any file extensions like '.gz' or '.tar' that you would like ls
# to colorize below. Put the extension, a space, and the color init string.
# (and any comments you want to add after a '#')
 
# DOS-style executables (bright green)
.bat  00;32
.BAT  00;32
.btm  00;32
.BTM  00;32
.cmd  00;32
.CMD  00;32
.com  00;32
.COM  00;32
.dll  00;32
.DLL  00;32
.exe  00;32
.EXE  00;32

# archives or compressed (bright red)
.7z   00;31
.ace  00;31
.ACE  00;31
.arj  00;31
.bz2  00;31
.cpio 00;31
.deb  00;31
.dz   00;31
.gz   00;31
.jar  00;31
.lzh  00;31
.lzma 00;31
.rar  00;31
.RAR  00;31
.rpm  00;31
.rz   00;31
.tar  00;31
.taz  00;31
.tb2  00;31
.tbz2 00;31
.tbz  00;31
.tgz  00;31
.tlz  00;31
.trz  00;31
.txz  00;31
.tz   00;31
.tz2  00;31
.xz   00;31
.z    00;31
.Z    00;31
.zip  00;31
.ZIP  00;31
.zoo  00;31

# multimedia (video/image/sound) file formats
.aac  00;35
.AAC  00;35
.anx  00;35
.asf  00;35
.ASF  00;35
.au   00;35
.axa  00;35
.axv  00;35
.avi  00;35
.AVI  00;35
.bmp  00;35
.BMP  00;35
.divx 00;35
.DIVX 00;35
.flac 00;35
.FLAC 00;35
.gif  00;35
.GIF  00;35
.jpg  00;35
.JPG  00;35
.jpeg 00;35
.JPEG 00;35
.m2a  00;35
.M2A  00;35
.m2v  00;35
.M2V  00;35
.m4a  00;35
.M4A  00;35
.m4p  00;35
.M4P  00;35
.m4v  00;35
.M4V  00;35
.mid  00;35
.midi 00;35
.mka  00;35
.mkv  00;35
.MKV  00;35
.mov  00;35
.MOV  00;35
.mp3  00;35
.MP3  00;35
.mp4  00;35
.MP4  00;35
.mp4v 00;35
.mpc  00;35
.MPC  00;35
.mpeg 00;35
.MPEG 00;35
.mpg  00;35
.MPG  00;35
.nuv  00;35
.oga  00;35
.ogv  00;35
.ogx  00;35
.ogg  00;35
.OGG  00;35
.pbm  00;35
.pgm  00;35
.png  00;35
.PNG  00;35
.ppm  00;35
.qt   00;35
.ra   00;35
.RA   00;35
.ram  00;35
.RAM  00;35
.rm   00;35
.RM   00;35
.spx  00;35
.svg  00;35
.svgz 00;35
.tga  00;35
.TGA  00;35
.tif  00;35
.TIF  00;35
.tiff 00;35
.TIFF 00;35
.vob  00;35
.VOB  00;35
.wav  00;35
.WAV  00;35
.wma  00;35
.WMA  00;35
.wmv  00;35
.WMV  00;35
.xbm  00;35
.xcf  00;35
.xpm  00;35
.xspf 00;35
.xwd  00;35
.XWD  00;35
.xvid 00;35

A final touch was editing my .bashrc and setting up my own PS1 line. Extensive information is available at the excellent Gentoo wiki. Specifically, these are the placeholders that can be used in the PS1 variable:

\u	Username.
\h	Hostname.
\w	Current directory.
\d	Current date.
\t	Current time.
\$	Indicate the root user with '#' and normal users with '$'.
\j	Number of currently running tasks (jobs).

Colour codes are as follows:

\e[0;30m\]	Black
\e[0;31m\]	Red
\e[0;32m\]	Green
\e[0;33m\]	Yellow
\e[0;34m\]	Blue
\e[0;35m\]	Magenta
\e[0;36m\]	Cyan
\e[0;37m\]	White
\e[0m\]	Reset to standard colors

So I ended up with the following PS1 line:

. /etc/profile
 
export VISUAL=nano
export EDITOR=nano

PS1='\u@\h \[[\e[1;34m\]\W/\[\e[0m\]] \$ '

This plainly shows the user log in and the current directory in blue. I do not want the full path to the current directory, therefore I used capital W in the \W option.