I set S_COLORS_SGR="I=32;22:N=36;1:W=35;1:X=31;1:Z=36;22"
in my environment. Why?
The output of many command line commands uses colours, which is great for efficiently grasping information at a single glance. Unfortunately,
default colours are often not suitable for dark backgrounds; for example, ls
displays directories in dark blue,
and iostat
uses the same colour for most of its numbers. Almost unreadable.
Colours of the two abovementioned tools can be configured with environment variables, namely LS_COLORS and S_COLORS_SGR,
respectively. LS_COLORS is very complex; it can be generated with the dircolors
command, whose config file is perhaps
even more complex but well documented by the dir_colors(5)
man page. Thankfully, several useful dircolors configurations
have been published, for example https://github.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized.