You can set the font color on the command line if you so desire.
To start, type this on your console:
echo “^[[0;31;40m In Color”
In Color
The first character is an escape character, which looks like two characters, ^ and [. To be able to print this, you have to press CTRL+V and then the ESC key. All the other characters are normal printable characters, so you see the string In Color in red. The type stays that color until you reverse back by typing this:
echo “\\033[0m reset;”
As you can see, it is easy to set and reset colors in a console or xterm.
If you want to omit the CTRL-V ESC key sequence you can use \033 instead.
So the lines would read:
echo “\033[0;31;40m In Color”
and echo “\033[0;37;40m”
The first line changes both the foreground and background.
To change just the text to red and keep the background color as is use:
echo “\033[0;31;1m In Color”
What are the attributes of the command
\033[{attr};{fg};{bg}m
{attr} needs to be one of the following:
0 Reset All Attributes (return to normal mode)
1 Bright (usually turns on BOLD)
2 Dim
3 Underline
5 Blink
7 Reverse
8 Hidden
{fg} needs to be one of the following:
30 30 Black
31 31 Red
32 32 Green
33 33 Yellow
34 34 Blue
35 35 Magenta
36 36 Cyan
37 37 White
{bg} needs to be one of the following:
40 Black
41 Red
42 Green
43 Yellow
44 Blue
45 Magenta
46 Cyan
47 White
I wanted to add in some more information that I have learned about colors. Especially, now that Linux uses the terminal colors which always seem to only work if you have black text on a white background.
Us old school admins like to have the terminals in color, or to have them transparent or what not. This seems to mess the heck up out of the terminal colors given in Linux.
If you check your aliases in Linux you should see that many of your standard commands now have a –color=tty added on to the end. For example, alias ls=’ls –color=tty’
One could always just type “unalias ls” and then there is no more colored output.
You can control the colors for you or the whole system.
Whole system edit: /etc/DIR_COLORS
For yourself cp /etc/DIR_COLORS ~.dircolors then edit .dircolors.
I tend to like a terminal that is black with white text, the dark blue colors just don’t work.
There is also a way to change the colors presented to you in VIM, so when you are editing a document on a black background you can read the lines. I just don’t have that info with me at the moment.
I did find my .vimrc that can help. I changed the comments from a dark blue to a light blue with the following.
” have syntax highlighting in terminals which can display colours:
syntax on
highlight Comment ctermfg=lightblue
Thx for this great information that you are shareing with us
Cannot make the command echo “\33[0m reset;” work, now I’m stuck with red text in my UNIX. What to do, it isn’t very pleasant.
Yours sincerely
Gunnar Sjoo
I just tested this myself and in some terminals the reset doesn’t like the escaped \33.
Try the echo command with the CTRL+V and then the ESC key.
The command would then look like echo “^[[0m reset;”
If that doesn’t work, just reset the color to what you want it to be, the following should make it white text on a black background.
> echo “33[0;37;40m In Color”
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