TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5)

🌸 TERMINAL-COLORS.D — the file format page, bestie edition 💅

okay so this is the terminal-colors.d manual, section 5 (File formats). It's the whole vibe of how your terminal decides what's pretty and what's plain. No cap.

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✨ NAME ✨

terminal-colors.d — configure output colorization for various utilities 🎨

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

/etc/terminal-colors.d/[name.|[name]@term.]type

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So the files chilling in this directory? They decide the default behavior for utilities when they're coloring output. That's literally their whole job.

The name is a utility name. It's optional, and when none is specified then the file is used for all unspecified utilities. she's a universal queen 👑

The term is a terminal identifier — aka the TERM environment variable. The terminal identifier is optional too, and when none is specified then the file is used for all unspecified terminals.

The type is a file type. Here are the supported file types, and yes you need to know all of them:

• disable — Turns off output colorization for all compatible utilities. Also peep the NO_COLOR environment variable below 👀
• enable — Turns on output colorization; any matching disable files are ignored.
• scheme — Specifies colors used for output. The file format may be specific to the utility, and the default format is described below.

Now here's the drama: if there are more files that match for a utility, then the file with the more specific filename wins. For example, the filename @xterm.scheme has less priority than dmesg@xterm.scheme. The lowest priority are those files without a utility name and terminal identifier (e.g., "disable"). Most specific girlie takes the crown.

And the user-specific $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d or $HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d overrides the global setting. Your personal config ate, fr fr.

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🎀 DEFAULT SCHEME FILES FORMAT 🎀

The following statement is recognized:

name color-sequence

The name is a logical name for the color sequence (for example: error). The names are specific to the utilities. For more details always see the COLORS section in the man page for the utility.

The color-sequence can be a color name, an ANSI color sequence, or an escape sequence. Pick your fighter 💖

🌈 Color names

Valid color names are: black, blink, blue, bold, brown, cyan, darkgray, gray, green, halfbright, lightblue, lightcyan, lightgray, lightgreen, lightmagenta, lightred, magenta, red, reset, reverse, and yellow.

🌈 ANSI color sequences

An ANSI color sequence is composed of sequences of numbers separated by semicolons. The most common codes are:

• 0 — to restore default color
• 1 — for brighter colors
• 4 — for underlined text
• 5 — for flashing text
• 30 — for black foreground
• 31 — for red foreground
• 32 — for green foreground
• 33 — for yellow (or brown) foreground
• 34 — for blue foreground
• 35 — for purple foreground
• 36 — for cyan foreground
• 37 — for white (or gray) foreground
• 40 — for black background
• 41 — for red background
• 42 — for green background
• 43 — for yellow (or brown) background
• 44 — for blue background
• 45 — for purple background
• 46 — for cyan background
• 47 — for white (or gray) background

For example, to use a red background for alert messages in the output of dmesg(1), use:

echo 'alert 37;41' >> /etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.scheme

slay. 🔥

🌈 Escape sequences

An escape sequence is needed to enter a space, backslash, caret, or any control character anywhere in a string, as well as a hash mark as the first character. These C-style backslash-escapes can be used:

• \a — Bell (ASCII 7)
• \b — Backspace (ASCII 8)
• \e — Escape (ASCII 27)
• \f — Form feed (ASCII 12)
• \n — Newline (ASCII 10)
• \r — Carriage Return (ASCII 13)
• \t — Tab (ASCII 9)
• \v — Vertical Tab (ASCII 11)
• \? — Delete (ASCII 127)
• \_ — Space
• \\ — Backslash (\)
• \^ — Caret (^)
• \\# — Hash mark (#)

🌈 Comments

Lines where the first non-blank character is a # (hash) are ignored. Any other use of the hash character is not interpreted as introducing a comment. So don't get cute with it.

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💜 ENVIRONMENT 💜

• TERMINAL_COLORS_DEBUG=all — enables debug output.
• NO_COLOR — if defined, this disables output colorization unless explicitly enabled by a command-line option. See https://no-color.org/ for more details. Supported since util-linux version 2.41.

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d
• $HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d
• /etc/terminal-colors.d

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⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

Disable colors for all compatible utilities:

touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable

Disable colors for all compatible utils on a vt100 terminal:

touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/@vt100.disable

Disable colors for all compatible utils except dmesg(1):

touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.enable

the enable file really said "not her, she's exempt" 💀

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👑 COMPATIBILITY 👑

The terminal-colors.d functionality is currently supported by all util-linux utilities which provide colorized output. For more details always see the COLORS section in the man page for the utility.

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🙈 REPORTING BUGS 🙈

For bug reports, use the issue tracker <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

bestie if something's broken, tell the maintainers, don't just suffer in silence 😭

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🫶 AVAILABILITY 🫶

terminal-colors.d is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.

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and that's the whole page, bestie — no skips, no cuts, every flag and every escape sequence accounted for. This one's from util-linux 2.42.4, dated 2026-09-21. go be colorful 🎀✨💖