Charly’s Column – colorls

Color Cast

Article from Issue 211/2018
Author(s):

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.

[...]

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