Re: [gentoo-dev] use of color

[Gontran <gontran@gontran.net>]

* Collins Richey (erichey2@home.com) wrote:
> The shell and many of the tools on Gentoo use color which choice I find to
> be absolutely worthless however popular this bit of eye candy may be for
> others.  On XFCE the default background for Terminal makes the color
> displays almost illegible.
> 
> Could someone post instructions to find and kill the color settings, ie
> shell prompt, man, and any other tools that use color setting.

Hi Collins,

This kind of depends on your shell, but basically boils down to a single 
line in an rc file.

For BASH: in ~/.bashrc, say at the bottom, add
	export PS1="$ "
( or whatever you'd like your prompt to be)

For (t)csh: in ~/.(t)cshrc add the line
	set prompt="> "

Now if you're using sh for your shell, you may want to look at /etc/profile
and hack about in those conditions at the 'export PS1' lines.

You'll need to re-source those files, or relogin, or start a new XFterm to
see the effects.

Far as getting man to be without color (sicko), modify or create a
.mostrc file in ~/ and add the following lines to it:

	color overstrike normal default
	color underline normal default

Or you could just change your default environment variable PAGER from 
'most' to 'less' (sounds like a bad idea doesn't it?).

If that's not working or whatever, most does look at your term settings
so, again depending on your shell, change your term variable to a term
type that doesn't support color and you should get shades of gray.

Now to add a counter opinion: I find the use of color in all aspects of Gentoo
not only tremendously refreshing but valuable.  Contrast man!  Thank you Gentoo
for introducing me to most!  The inclusion of 'most' I find to be VERY 
professional, it reminds me of how cool man pages on OBSD VT look.  
And thank you for the color indicators in things like 
'emerge --pretend *.ebuild'! That's the smoothest.

Woo-hoo!
Gontran