terminal-colors.d(5) — Linux manual page
TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5) File formats TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5)
NAME
terminal-colors.d - configure output colorization for various
utilities
SYNOPSIS
/etc/terminal-colors.d/[[name][@term].][type]
DESCRIPTION
Files in this directory determine the default behavior for
utilities when coloring output.
The name is a utility name. The name is optional and when none is
specified then the file is used for all unspecified utilities.
The term is a terminal identifier (the TERM environment
variable). The terminal identifier is optional and when none is
specified then the file is used for all unspecified terminals.
The type is a file type. Supported file types are:
disable
Turns off output colorization for all compatible utilities.
enable
Turns on output colorization; any matching disable files are
ignored.
scheme
Specifies colors used for output. The file format may be
specific to the utility, the default format is described
below.
If there are more files that match for a utility, then the file
with the more specific filename wins. For example, the filename
"@xterm.scheme" has less priority than "dmesg@xterm.scheme". The
lowest priority are those files without a utility name and
terminal identifier (e.g., "disable").
The user-specific $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d or
$HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d overrides the global setting.
DEFAULT SCHEME FILES FORMAT
The following statement is recognized:
name color-sequence
The name is a logical name of color sequence (for example
"error"). The names are specific to the utilities. For more
details always see the COLORS section in the man page for the
utility.
The color-sequence is a color name, ASCII color sequences or
escape sequences.
Color names
black, blink, blue, bold, brown, cyan, darkgray, gray, green,
halfbright, lightblue, lightcyan, lightgray, lightgreen,
lightmagenta, lightred, magenta, red, reset, reverse, and yellow.
ANSI color sequences
The color sequences are composed of sequences of numbers
separated by semicolons. The most common codes are:
┌────┬───────────────────────┐
│ │ │
│ 0 │ to restore default │
│ │ color │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 1 │ for brighter colors │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 4 │ for underlined text │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 5 │ for flashing text │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 30 │ for black foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 31 │ for red foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 32 │ for green foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 33 │ for yellow (or brown) │
│ │ foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 34 │ for blue foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 35 │ for purple foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 36 │ for cyan foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 37 │ for white (or gray) │
│ │ foreground │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 40 │ for black background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 41 │ for red background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 42 │ for green background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 43 │ for yellow (or brown) │
│ │ background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 44 │ for blue background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 45 │ for purple background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 46 │ for cyan background │
├────┼───────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 47 │ for white (or gray) │
│ │ background │
└────┴───────────────────────┘
Escape sequences
To specify control or blank characters in the color
sequences, C-style \-escaped notation can be used:
┌────┬─────────────────────┐
│ │ │
│ \a │ Bell (ASCII 7) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \b │ Backspace (ASCII 8) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \e │ Escape (ASCII 27) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \f │ Form feed (ASCII │
│ │ 12) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \n │ Newline (ASCII 10) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \r │ Carriage Return │
│ │ (ASCII 13) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \t │ Tab (ASCII 9) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \v │ Vertical Tab (ASCII │
│ │ 11) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \? │ Delete (ASCII 127) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \_ │ Space │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \\ │ Backslash (\) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \^ │ Caret (^) │
├────┼─────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \# │ Hash mark (#) │
└────┴─────────────────────┘
Please note that escapes are necessary to enter a
space, backslash, caret, or any control character
anywhere in the string, as well as a hash mark as
the first character.
For example, to use a red background for alert
messages in the output of dmesg(1), use:
echo 'alert 37;41' >>
/etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.scheme
Comments
Lines where the first non-blank character is a #
(hash) are ignored. Any other use of the hash
character is not interpreted as introducing a
comment.
ENVIRONMENT
TERMINAL_COLORS_DEBUG=all
enables debug output.
FILES
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d
$HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d
/etc/terminal-colors.d
EXAMPLE
Disable colors for all compatible utilities:
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable
Disable colors for all compatible utils on a
vt100 terminal:
touch
/etc/terminal-colors.d/@vt100.disable
Disable colors for all compatible utils except
dmesg(1):
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable
touch
/etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.enable
COMPATIBILITY
The terminal-colors.d functionality is currently
supported by all util-linux utilities which
provides colorized output. For more details
always see the COLORS section in the man page for
the utility.
REPORTING BUGS
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
AVAILABILITY
terminal-colors.d is part of the util-linux
package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel
Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.
This page is part of the util-linux (a random
collection of Linux utilities) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.
If you have a bug report for this manual page,
send it to util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page
was obtained from the project's upstream Git
repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩
on 2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the
most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the
page, or you believe there is a better or more
up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in
this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad 2023-07-19 TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5)
Pages that refer to this page: cal(1), dmesg(1), hexdump(1), cfdisk(8), fdisk(8), sfdisk(8)