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.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • lsd and eza

    LSDeluxe and eza are modern implementations of the ancient Unix ls command in the Rust programming language.

    more »
  • Colorful lsd

    A revamp of ls, lsd offers color coding plus revised options relevant to the modern computer.

    more »
  • Charly’s Column: Cluster SSH

    Charly doesn’t relish the idea of searching through the logfiles of a dozen proxy servers when page requests fail. Now that he has deployed Cluster SSH, he can pull the strings on many machines at the same time.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Fish

    Columnist Charly serves up Fish as the "shellfish" of the day. His conclusion: tasty, but not something you would want every day.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: Smorgasbord

    Sys admin columnist Charly Kühnast has an electronic note box in which he collects ideas and small snippets of code. He calls it his "quarry" and is taking this opportunity to offer up some collectors' items to regular readers.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus