Re: zsh and color

["Mr B.R. Stephens" <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Coleman writes:
> > I have just started using Linux, which comes with the color gnu ls.
> > This is all quite nice, but when I do completions under zsh, they
> > are just the plain old black and white.  Are there any plans to add
> > the color to zsh?
> 
> I don't forsee this happening any time soon.  There are too many other
> things still in the pipeline that need to be done.  Also, I don't like
> the idea of adding features to the baseline that would only be used by
> people on a particular OS.

I agree this is an extra feature, but it's not limited to Linux.  The
patched ls works fine on any unix machine (it's a patch to the GNU
fileutils) and produces colour on any terminal that supports ANSI
colour control sequences (or non-ANSI, for that matter; it's absurdly
configurable).

To make things more flexible (and to make life easier for zsh
maintainers), what about a function that gets called on filenames that
are to be printed in completion tables?  A default one could add a * to
executable files, a / to directories and so on, but other functions
could be substituted.  (There's a problem with formatting here; perhaps
it could be punted by giving the optional function the list of
completions, and let it decide how to format them?)

> But if someone creates a patch, I could always put it in a Contrib
> directory for people that are interested.

That would do.

-- 
Bruce                   Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation
bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   University of Liverpool