Colors Talk: A Colorful Terminal / Console

If you’ve ever used a GNU Gentoo or Funtoo Linux variant, or a live version of any of them, you may have noticed their eye-catching colorful terminal or console. Whether you’re on a virtual console or one of KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE terminal apps.

A Colorful Xfce4 Terminal on FreeBSD (Bash)

A Colorful Xfce4 Terminal on FreeBSD (Bash)

The default Xfce4 Terminal on FreeBSD (sh csh)

The default Xfce4 Terminal on FreeBSD (sh csh)

When I’ve migrated from Funtoo to FreeBSD, the one thing that I’ve missed so badly was its colorful terminal. The nice thing about these colors is taht they always give you some valuable hints, e.g., currently you’re root user or a regular user, the file is a symlink (Symbolic link), executable or just a regular file.

Well, it’s pretty easy to have your own colorful terminal or console, once you’ve found out how Gentoo and Funtoo did that. Fortunately, it works on *BSD and all other Linux distros as well. So, stay with me and I’ll describe the process in the following.

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