AmirWatad.com

Add Colors to Your Manpages

I use the manpages a lot. Manpages are a very useful database of information for linux users and developers. The problem with them is that their appearance becomes boring after a while.

I already wrote a post about reading them from firefox, so they’re displayed in a nice way as html pages.

In this post we’ll add colors to the manpages viewed from inside the shell.

First, open your ~/.bashrc file. To open it with gedit you can type:

gedit ~/.bashrc

Now, to the end of this file, append this:

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$’\E[01;31m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$’\E[01;34m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$’\E[01;44;33m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$’\E[01;32m’

The strange ‘\E[01;32m’ are special strings which tell the shell to change its foreground’s/background’s color (see my previos post about writing with color in a linux shell). You can change them to suite your terminal’s background color.

Now, save your .bashrc file.

As expected from their names, the above variables do not affect the man program directly, but affect ‘less’ program instead. So, in order to complete our task, we should add an alias to our aliases file (If you don’t have an aliases file you can add this to your .bashrc file):

Add this line to your aliases file:

alias man=’man -P less’

This tells the man program to use less as its pager.

That’s it. Now you just to try it. For example, type: man ls

And see the magic

Note: This was originally posted in Tips4Linux.com

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Tags: Linux, Linux Development, Manpages