How to change the color of this blue text on the command line

colorsputtyterminal

I know this question has been asked multiple times but I didn't find the answer on those other questions.

Here an Image to illustrate my point:

Can you read the blue line without squinting? No? Me neither.

I am running an ansible playbook in full verbose mode and need to read those logs with a playbook of 50+ tasks.

Can anyone explain how can I change those colors?

Questions I looked at where I didn't figure out a solution:

Best Answer

Nope, never have been able to read blue on black (and life is far too short to fiddle with colour customizations in every terminal or console combination I might use) so I disable colors by default. With xterm, an .Xdefaults entry of:

XTerm*colorMode:false

does wonders; otherwise, without a means to kill the colors in the terminal, application specific hacks may be necessary; a quick kluge is to use a shell function and pipe the output to cat which disconnects ansible from the terminal and may cause it to not spam colors:

function ansible-playbook {
    command ansible-playbook "$@" | cat
}

Another kluge is to fiddle with the TERM, e.g. TERM=vt220 ansible-playbook ... (this tends to work on older systems, but the color spam alas is present with TERM=vt220 on modern systems and changing the TERM without knowing what you're getting into is probably a bad idea).

However! From some spelunking under the ansible sources, ansible is not buggy and does provide an ANSIBLE_NOCOLOR=1 environment variable:

ANSIBLE_NOCOLOR=1 ansible-playbook ...

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Bash – Change the PS1 color based on the background color

As far as I know, there's no way to query the colors of the terminal emulator. You can change them with \e]4;NUMBER;#RRGGBB\a (where NUMBER is the terminal color number (0–7 for light colors, 8–15 for bright colors) and #RRGGBB is a hexadecimal RGB color value) if your terminal supports that sequence (reference: ctlseqs).

Powerful color scheme mechanisms often have a dark or light background setting that you must supply to indicate whether you have a black or dark gray background, or a white or light gray background.

When you're configuring for yourself, it's usually enough to decide you'll always use the same background color.

Grep –color Adds ANSI Code ESC[K – How to Manage Displayed Text

You can change this behavior by setting the GREP_COLORS environment variable:

export GREP_COLORS=ne
echo -e "ab\rc" | grep --color=always "c"

From the grep man page:

          ne     Boolean  value  that prevents clearing to the end of line
                 using Erase in Line (EL) to Right  (\33[K)  each  time  a
                 colorized  item  ends.   This  is  needed on terminals on
                 which EL is not supported.  It  is  otherwise  useful  on
                 terminals  for  which  the back_color_erase (bce) boolean
                 terminfo capability  does  not  apply,  when  the  chosen
                 highlight colors do not affect the background, or when EL
                 is too slow or causes too much flicker.  The  default  is
                 false (i.e., the capability is omitted).

It's done in the first place to set the background of the rest of the line to the correct color, in case it was changed earlier (though by default it isn't; somebody might set it up to do so in their own settings).

You may also want to play with the other options that can be set in GREP_COLORS; see the man page for full details.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Change the PS1 color based on the background color

Grep –color Adds ANSI Code ESC[K – How to Manage Displayed Text

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