Ubuntu – Terminal has lost its colours

16.04bashcommand line

In terminal, the usual prompt text user@machine isn't green/blue as usual. Instead is is just white like the rest of the text. If I ssh into my server however, the colours are the same. Perhaps I've accidentally hit a button?

The settings in Edit → Profile Preferences → Colors look fine. The selected palette shown there is Linux Console.

I've tried using apt remove gnome-terminal && apt install gnome-terminal but that still hasn't worked. I've also tried using the MATE Terminal method and using UXTerm but both of which are doing the same issue.

Best Answer

I ran into this issue when I accidentally deleted my ~/.bashrc file. Changing the Profile Preferences as stated in a comment above did not work. Since I completely lost my ~/.bashrc file, I simply copied /etc/skel/.bashrc to ~/.bashrc. After a logout and login, my terminal colors were back to normal.

One could also look at /etc/skel/.bashrc to see if anything related to color is missing from their ~/.bashrc file.

This may not be the solution to OP's exact problem but I hope it helps somebody.

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Ubuntu – Gnome-terminal backgroud and foreground colour issue

foreground-color and friends are of type string. If you perform a dconf read ... on the said field, the output will be quoted within single quotes, e.g.:

'rgb(0,0,0)'

To write such a value, you have to pass those literal quote characters to dconf, that is, you have to protect them from your shell from being parsed as special characters.

One possible way to protect them is to enclose the entire string within double quotes, e.g.:

dconf write ... "'rgb(0,43,54)'"

Ubuntu – Syntax highlighting in terminal

Bash (the default shell of Ubuntu) doesn't have this ability. It uses GNU readline, and likely would be a serious effort to implement it.

But, there are mechanisms to use different shells. Two common ones that are talked about a lot are:

oh-my-zsh - "Your terminal never felt this good before.
fish - "A command line shell for the 90s"

See the respective sites for up to date setup instructions. But in general the shells are not that hard to configure. Fish, for instance is:

sudo apt install fish
chsh -s /usr/bin/fish
# logout/login

Then, if you want to switch back

chsh -s /bin/bash
# logout/login

oh-my-zsh isn't as easy, but it's the same idea.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Gnome-terminal backgroud and foreground colour issue

Ubuntu – Syntax highlighting in terminal

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