Uploaded August 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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This is a tutorial on how to enable colors for your terminal output in Arch Linux. In particular, in your Bash environment, in your pacman package manager, and for your nano text editor.

1. Enable colors in Bash.

Backu up the settings:
cp .bashrc .bashrc.backup
sudo cp /etc/bash.bashrc /etc/bash.bashrc.backup

Download links for these three files are in this article: averagelinuxuser.com/linux-terminal-color

Move these files to the following places:
sudo mv bash.bashrc /etc/bash.bashrc
sudo mv DIR_COLORS /etc/
mv .bashrc ~/

2. Colorful output in pacman.

Back up you pacman.config file.
sudo cp /etc/pacman.conf /etc/pacman.conf.backup

And uncomment the word color in that file:
sudo sed -i 's/#Color/Color/g' /etc/pacman.conf

3. Syntaxt highlighting in nano.

Backup you nano config files:
cp ~/.nanorc ~/.nanorc .backup
sudo cp /etc/nanorc /etc/nanorc.backup

Edit either ~/.nanorc or /etc/nanorc. Add the following line at the end of the file:
include "/usr/share/nano/*.nanorc"

The wallpaper can be downloaded from my wallpaper G+ collection plus.google.com/b/105235169774065518394/collection/YlkQNE

Please, let me know if you know more terminal color settings. Maybe I missed something.
Thank you for watching.

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