Macos – iTerm window highlighted on the current line

man ls has additional information on color listings.

Using the -G flag with ls ought to enable colour, if your shell's $TERM environment is set to a colour-capable value.

To have colour listings be the default of ls, the CLICOLOR environment variable can be set (to anything, even '') in the appropriate login script file.

It's either done like this:

CLICOLOR=''; export CLICOLOR

or

setenv CLICOLOR

depending on what login shell you use.

For interactive as-you-type colourizations...

There are quite a few add-ons for the zsh shell. A google search on "color completion zsh" will return dozens of articles on how to set up coloured prompts and file-completion.

I did come across a reference to fish, a Friendly Interactive Shell. I installed it on my Mac, and it appears to work as you've indicated.

If which fish gives a Command not found error, you'll have to install it from the official fish homepage.

One can inspect the list of files installed by a Homebrew formula via brew list -f <formula_name>. In this case, the output should like

> brew list -f z
/usr/local/Cellar/z/1.9/etc/profile.d/z.sh
/usr/local/Cellar/z/1.9/INSTALL_RECEIPT.json
/usr/local/Cellar/z/1.9/README
/usr/local/Cellar/z/1.9/share/man/man1/z.1

Note that in this case there's no command (and not even bin), just a z.sh. This makes sense because z is a shell tool, and have to be sourced into the shell as functions to get and set the shell environment; running as an external command simply doesn't offer deep enough integration. Therefore, you have to source z.sh into your shell, probably in .bash_profile, .bashrc, or .zshrc.

Usually, Homebrew formulae that require post-installation interactions in order to be usable will have instructions listed in caveats, which will be shown post-install, or manually retrieved via brew info <formula_name>. In this case,

> brew info z
<irrelevant info omitted>
==> Caveats
For Bash or Zsh, put something like this in your $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.zshrc:
  . `brew --prefix`/etc/profile.d/z.sh

Of course you should take that advise with a grain of salt, and use more modern and human-readable shell syntax:

source "$(brew --prefix)/etc/profile.d/z.sh"

Or

source /usr/local/etc/profile.d/z.sh

if you know your Homebrew installation is in /usr/local.