Charly’s Column – colorls
Color Cast
The first time in our lives we got to a black-and-white Linux or Unix shell, most of us probably typed ls first. In a mixture of nostalgia and the knowledge that life is colorful, columnist Charly Kühnast plays a colorful trump card with colorls.
colorls
[1] is written in Ruby. If you don't have this language on your system yet, install it quickly:
sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev ruby-colorize
Then you download a character set that you really like from Nerd Fonts [2] – say, Roboto Mono Nerd Font Regular. After unpacking the ZIP file, I moved the character set to the /usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/
directory on my Ubuntu desktop; users of other distributions may need to change this path.
Why do I even get this font when there are a few dozen others preinstalled? Because Nerd Font's character sets are more extensive, containing more symbols, special characters, glyphs, and emojis than usual (Figure 1). Now I select the new font in my terminal's preferences. This fulfills the preconditions, and I can proceed to install colorls
by typing:
sudo gem install colorls
The developers know that nobody types colorls
50 times a day. I recommend that you create an lc
alias in your ~/.bashrc
:
alias lc='colorls'
If you use a light terminal background, you should always specify --light
or, preferably, make it permanent by appending it to the .bashrc
alias. The output then resembles that in Figure 2 – note the cute icons and bright colors. Light-shy workers can choose a variant optimized for dark terminals by specifying --dark
.
No Blind Faith in Color
Speaking of the downside: colorls
is a new implementation of ls
, which does not implement all options identically and others not at all. My big favorites -l
and --sort=size
fortunately work. If you type -f
, colorls
only displays files; -d
only displays directories. If I want to see both, I have the choice between --sd
(directories first – note the two dashes!) and --sf
(files first).
If you would like a brightly colored ls
, but have problems with colorls
because of missing parameters, schedule a test run with exa
[4], which doesn't offer any fancy icons but does support almost all the ls
parameters and adds some on top. Especially with the defaults, exa
impresses – for example, the -h
parameter (human readable), which outputs file sizes in human-readable units instead of bytes, is implicit.
Infos
- colorls: https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls
- Download character sets: https://nerdfonts.com/#downloads
- Nerd Font Cheat Sheet: https://nerdfonts.com/#cheat-sheet
- exa: https://the.exa.website
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
News
-
GNOME 43 To Bring Some Exciting New Features
GNOME 43 is getting close to the first alpha development release and it promises to add one particular feature that should be exciting to several users.
-
KaOS 2022.06 Now Available With KDE Plasma 5.25
The newest iteration of KaOS Linux not only adds the latest KDE Plasma desktop but sets LibreOffice as the default.
-
Manjaro 21.3.0 Is Now Available
Manjaro “Ruah” has been released and includes the latest Calamares installer, GNOME 42, and much more.
-
SpiralLinux is a New Linux Distribution Focused on Simplicity
A new Linux distribution, from the creator of GeckoLinux, is a Debian-based operating system with a focus on simplicity and ease of use.
-
HP Dev One Linux Laptop is Now Available for Pre-Order
The System76/HP collaboration Dev One laptop, geared toward developers, is now available for pre-order.
-
NixOS 22.5 Is Now Available
The latest release of NixOS with a much-improved package manager and a user-friendly graphical installer.
-
System76 Teams up with HP to Create the Dev One Laptop
HP and System76 have come together to develop a new laptop, powered by Pop!_OS and aimed toward developers.
-
Titan Linux is a New KDE Linux Based on Debian Stable
Titan Linux is a new Debian-based Linux distribution that features the KDE Plasma desktop with a focus on usability and performance.
-
Danielle Foré Has an Update for elementary OS 7
Now that Ubuntu 22.04 has been released, the team behind elementary OS is preparing for the upcoming 7.0 release.
-
Linux New Media Launches Open Source JobHub
New job website focuses on connecting technical and non-technical professionals with organizations in open source.