change color of prompt in bash profile - bash

Question

I am trying to change the color of the prompt in my terminal to green text for the user at the start and white ~
Currently my .bash_profile file is configured the following way to provide a yellow color for the user name and a pink color for the ~
PS1='\e[33;1m\u#\h: \e[31m\W\e[0m\$'
Does anyone know how to modify the above to change to the colors to green and white?
Thanks!

Answer 1

PS1='\e[32;1m\u#\h: \e[37m\W\e[0m\$'
The numbers after the [ are the color codes. See this reference.

Answer 2

You are looking to change the ANSI escape sequences, specifically the colors.
\e[...m takes a semicolon-separate list of codes to manipulate how the following text is displayed. 33 represents yellow foreground text, 1 represents bold text, 31 represents red foreground text, and 0 resets all values (foreground and background colors, styles, etc) to their terminal defaults.
# Make text yellow and bold, then make it red (keeping it bold)
# and finally restore the default
PS1='\e[33;1m\u#\h: \e[31m\W\e[0m\$'
To use green/white instead of yellow/red, change 33 to 32 and 31 to 37. Also, be sure to enclose characters that do not take up any space on screen inside \[...\] so that the shell can properly determine the length of your prompt.
PS1='\[\e[32;1m\]\u#\h: \[\e[37m\]\W\[\e[0m\]\$'
This assumes that your terminal understands ANSI escape sequences; a more portable method is to use tput to output the codes your actual terminal uses:
PS1='\[$(tput bold; tput setaf 2)\u#\h: \[$(tput setaf y)\]\W$(tput sgr0)\$ '
zsh, incidentally, makes this much easier; it has built-in escapes for changing the color in a terminal-independent way:
# 1. Everything between %B and %b is in bold
# 2. Everything between %F{x} and %f is in a different color;
# x can be a color name, and you can switch from one
# color to another without using %f
# 3. zsh is smart enough to account for built-in escapes when
# computing the prompt lenght, so no equivalent of \[...\]
# is needed
# 4. %n is the same as \u
# 5. %m is the same as \h
# 6. %~ is roughly the same as \W
# 7. %# is roughly the same as \$
PS1='%B%F{green}%n#%m: %F{white}%~%b%f%# '

Answer 3

This approach has two benefits over the others:
it brackets the escape sequences using \[ and ``]to prevent character count problems withCTRL-A` editing of wrapped lines
it uses tput to change the colors so that it is a little more self-documenting what is being done:
PS1='\[$(tput setaf 2)\]\u#\h: \[$(tput setaf 7)\]\W\[$(tput sgr0)\]\$'

Answer 4

To change color of prompt in each section, try to use this simple repo:
https://github.com/joenmarz/bashrc-alias
You can change the color of each prompt section like:
username
'#' sign
hostname
time
bracket sign '[' and ']'
root indicator (# for root user), ($ for non-root user)
The look of your prompt will be like:
[username#hostname 00:00 AM ~/working/directory $]
Go to line 33 of this file (bashrc-alias/.bashrc) to customize each prompt section color variables:
open_brk_color to change open bracket color
closed_brk_color to change closed bracket color
at_color to change '#' sign color
username_color to change username color
hostname_color to change hostname color
time_color to change time prompt color
wd_color to change working directory prompt color
ri_color to change root indicator color
How To Install
Clone this repository at your home directory
git clone https://github.com/joenmarz/bashrc-alias
Add the file path inside your existing ~/.bash file:
. /home/$USER/bashrc-alias/aliases
refesh your .bashrc source by typing:
source ~/.bashrc
I made it easier by adding some variables to each prompt section.