Tag: dircolors

ls colors broken under Solarized dark theme

A recent change introduced in GNU coreutils changed the default dircolors for backup files to make them less conspicuous. However, despite having stated that it works on dark backgrounds, this change made it impossible to see backup files such as .tar, .swp, .bak, .old when using the dark variant of the Solarized color scheme of the terminal. It can be seen in the following screenshots:

Solarized dark
Solarized light

To fix it, we’ll override the colors by creating ~/.dircolors file:

$ dircolors -p | sed "s/00;90/00;30/g" > ~/.dircolors
$ eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)

This will set the color of backup files to black, which makes them not stand out, but still readable.

This is the bash function I used to pretty-print all ls colors:

( # Run in a subshell so it won't crash current color settings 
    dircolors -b >/dev/null
    IFS=:
    for ls_color in ${LS_COLORS[@]}; do # For all colors
        color=${ls_color##*=}
        ext=${ls_color%%=*}
        echo -en "\E[${color}m${ext}\E[0m " # echo color and extension
    done
    echo
)

Another option, albeit more verbose, would be

$ dircolors --print-ls-colors ~/.dircolors | paste -sd ''