MacOS – Mac OS X Terminal: How to make the pico editor syntax highlight

If you just want to highlight sources you dump into the terminal a la cat try excellent pygments. It actually supports a lot of languages. Run with

pygmentize source.py

If instead you were talking about editing files with syntax highlighting inside a mac terminal, this really depends on the editor.

• for vi or vim you want at least these option in ~/.vimrc

  syntax on
  

• emacs works right out of the box

• don't ask me about nano.

Do you have a .bashrc or similar on those machines that you are ssh'ing to? I believe that is what you need, with something like alias ls="ls --color=auto" or alias ls="ls -G"(depending on your ls) in each (for ls; there are lots of other options to do other colors with other terminal programs).