Hi All,

I'm trying to configure my user environment on a box where I have only normal user's rights.

The host box is using FreeBSD 4.11 and Bash 2.05b. On my personal box I use Bash 3.00.16 and Slackware 10.2.

I successfully uploaded a .bash_profile config file to help customize my environment. The file is working because my prompt is correct as well as several environment variables and alias commands. However, I cannot get colors to work correctly with the ls command or inside vim.

Colors seem to be working partially because my shell prompt is colorized just as I configured. To be certain that some colorization was functional, I temporarily edited my .bash_profile and modified my shell prompt without colors. After logging out and logging in via SSH, my prompt was colorless. I then restored my .bash_profile and the prompt colors returned.

Similarly, when I launch vim empty, the intro screen shows some blue colors , but when I open a shell script or html file there is no syntax highlighting in the text.

I uploaded my .vimrc config file from my personal box. I also uploaded my own DIR_COLORS file and then edited .bash_profile to reference that file instead of the system file. As a result the LS_OPTIONS and LS_COLORS environment variables are exactly the same as on my personal box. But no colors when listing files with ls. Likewise no colors with vim.

A little help is appreciated!

dir colors in terms:
add "source /etc/profile" to ~/.bashrc

vim colors:
cp /usr/share/vim/vim63/vimrc_example.vim /usr/share/vim/vimrc

I finally got vim to display colored syntax highlighting. The server is using vim 6.4.x and my config file is for 6.3.x. I had to delete my .vimrc and copy the sample from the vim64 directory.

Regarding a colorized ls command, the problem is related to using BSD. I've been browsing the BSD man pages but no success thus far. I don't know the differences between BSD and Slack/Linux so any help is appreciated.

If anybody is interested I finally got color to work with my ls command on that FreeBSD server. Apparently the ls command in FreeBSD is not the same as the GNU ls command. Also, the FreeBSD ls command does not seem to recognize any LS_OPTIONS environment variable.

My particular solution was to upload a copy of my DIR_COLORS file to my home directory. In my ~/.bashrc I used the familiar eval `dircolors -b $HOME/etc/DIR_COLORS` directive to generate the LS_COLORS environment variable. Then I had to use an alias to use the gnuls command:

alias ls="gnuls -laFb --color=always"

The only thing consistent in the computer world is that very little is consistent.