Color over SSH (not just in text editors)

**tobias-richards** · January 31st, 2022

Emacs is my editor of choice. Sue me. Over SSH, I see all the relevant colors in emacs. What I don't see is bright green for executable, light blue for symlink, dark blue for directory. How can I see those colors over SSH whether from Linux, xBSD, Mac, Windows (putty/kitty) or other? I currently see no colors when running ls over any of these SSH clients. Yes, my SSH clients support color. I told you guys that I see colors in emacs.

No, ls --color or such thing is not what I want. I want to run ls with no extras, and see color from any SSH client that supports color.

**The Cog** · January 31st, 2022

Have a read of ~/.bashrc on your local PC. There is a lot of colour manipulation in there, deciding when to show colour or not.
Also note this in "man ls":

Using color to distinguish file types is disabled both by default and with --color=never. With --color=auto, ls emits color codes only when standard output is connected to a terminal. The LS_COL‐
ORS environment variable can change the settings. Use the dircolors command to set it.

I suspect that you never actually run ls with no extras.

**Impavidus** · January 31st, 2022

From ls' man page:

Code:

       --color[=WHEN]
              colorize  the output; WHEN can be 'always' (default if omitted),
              'auto', or 'never'; more info below

(...)

       Using  color  to distinguish file types is disabled both by default and
       with --color=never.  With --color=auto, ls emits color codes only  when
       standard  output is connected to a terminal.  The LS_COLORS environment
       variable can change the settings.  Use the dircolors command to set it.

When you create your user during Ubuntu install, you get a number of aliases automatically:

Code:

$ alias
(...)
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

So by default, ls runs with --color=auto, which will show colours when your use it directly on a terminal, but not when redirecting the output to a file, a pipe to a different tool or to ssh. You can change this by changing the alias, but then it will also use colours when writing to a file and there are tools that may be broken by such behaviour.