Shell prompt

First of all, you should check you’re using bash shell:

$ env | grep ^SHELL=
SHELL=/bin/bash

If not, you should check if bash package is already installed. If it’s already there, just change your user shell (and possibly root shell) with chsh or consult your OS manual. Be careful: if bash is not listed in /etc/shells, you might lock yourself out.

To set Gentoo-like colors on bash prompt, edit ~/.profile (or /etc/profile for system-wide defaults) and add the following:

if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
        PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] '
else
        PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \$\[\033[00m\] '
fi

GNU ls

If you use GNU ls (use –version to check) and dircolors utility is available (from GNU coreutils), you can have colorful outputs by adding the following snippet to your bash profile (see above):

if type -P dircolors >/dev/null ; then
        if [[ -f ~/.dir_colors ]] ; then
                eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dir_colors)
        elif [[ -f /etc/DIR_COLORS ]] ; then
                eval $(dircolors -b /etc/DIR_COLORS)
        fi
fi
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

To enable colors, you need to save Gentoo color defs to ~/.dir_colors (or /etc/DIR_COLORS for system-wide defaults).
Alternatively, if you miss dircolors binary on your system, save output from dircolors on a Gentoo machine and copy’n'paste it into bash profile:

LS_COLORS='...weird colon-separated string...'
export LS_COLORS
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

BSD ls implementation

A special trick is required for FreeBSD and Mac OS X: add the following line to your bash profile:

export CLICOLOR=1 LSCOLORS="ExGxFxDxCxDxDxhbhdacEc"

If you want to further customize colors on your Mac OS X Terminal, you can use SIMBL TerminalColours plugin (Snow Leopard version).

GNU grep

You can enable coloring of the matched part by appending the following alias to your bash profile:

alias grep='grep --colour=auto'

As usual, if you have any coloring tips’n'tricks you want to share, please use the comment box below.