I have a problem using these methods to get colors in my man pages in gentoo. I've asked already in the gentoo forums but it still doesn't work, and the comments in a bug report (Bug 184604) don't work either. Can someone help me to get colours in my man pages?
EDIT: Yes, I'm using less as pager and urxvt-unicode as terminal emulator
EDIT2:
I already asked in the gentoo forums but it didn't help, this is the link: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-819833-start-0.html.
Could be a number of problems.
Seeing as you're using zsh, try putting this in your ~/.zshrc:
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;47;34m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'
export LESS=-r
Then open a new terminal window and try running
man ls
if it's not working, run each of the following to find out where the problem is:
Number 1
typeset -p LESS_TERMCAP_md | cat -v
should print
typeset -x LESS_TERMCAP_md="^[[01;31m"
and
typeset -p LESS
should print
typeset -x LESS="-r"
if not, you put the export LESS stuff in the wrong file.
Number 2
echo "${LESS_TERMCAP_md}red${LESS_TERMCAP_me}"
should print
red
in a red color. If it doesn't there is something wrong with your terminal settings. Check your terminal settings (e.g. ~/.Xresources) or try running gnome-terminal or xterm and see if that works.
Number 3
echo -E "a^Ha" | LESS= less -r
(^H must be entered by pressing Ctrl+V then Ctrl+H)
should print
a
in red. If it doesn't, please run these
type less
less --version
and paste the output back in your question.
Number 4
bzcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bz2 | \
/bin/sh /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 | head -n 5 | cat -v
should print
LS(1) User Commands LS(1)
N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE
(note the ^H like in step number 3)
if it's printing something like:
LS(1) User Commands LS(1)
^[[1mNAME^[[0m
instead, you will need to find a way to disable "sgr escape sequences". The easiest thing to try is adding export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 to .zshrc, but there are other ways of fixing this.
Number 5
bzcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bz2 | \
/bin/sh /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 | less
should display the ls man page with colors.
man ls
should now be working!
typeset -p LESS not working is your problem. But seeing as you are using zsh, you should put export LESS=-r in your ~/.zshrc, not in ~/.bashrc. Please do that then try these steps again.
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz to bzcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls1.bs2.
Having read Mikels answer, its very comprehensive, and will hopefully work on all systems, but its probably overkill for myself ( also on a gentoo system. )
So here is a result for people who are very "Do long, didn't read" with all that shenanigans.
The Bare minimum I could do to get Coloured Man pages is as follows:
LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' GROFF_NO_SGR=1 man man
This renders text that was previously only in bold, in bold and red. ( The red characterised by the '31' in LESS_TERMCAP_md )
LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;32m'
These 2 rules control the formatting of the current line number display, and coerce it to rendering in Green.
LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;33m' LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
These 2 rules move everything that was previously underlined, to being underlined and yellow. ( 04 is 'underlined', 33 is "yellow" )
People searching for solutions to this in 2023 might be affected by a change in the groff package introduced in version 1.23.0.
Putting export MANROFFOPT=-c in my .zshrc fixed it for me.
(or alternatively GROFF_NO_SGR=1)
Background:
echo $TERMdisplay?