Colour Man Page Output in Console

On linux when you want to know how to use an application you would typically check a man (manual) page using the command man <app/command> e.g.

$ man ls

The output is going to be text which, depending on your console/terminal emulator’s theming, will be plain white text. But the man pages are coded in such a way that you can also output this text coloured.

Arch Linux wiki show us how to colour the text by edition your local profile¹. I’m using bash but the wiki has instructions for fish too. In the ~/.bashrc file enter the following function which will be run for man.

# enable colour support for man pages
man() {
  export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[1;31m'     # begin bold
  export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[1;36m'     # begin blink
  export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'        # reset bold/blink
  export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' # begin reverse video
  export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'        # reset reverse video
  export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[1;32m'     # begin underline
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'        # reset underline
  export GROFF_NO_SGR=1                  # for konsole and gnome-terminal
  command man "$@"
}

The last line of that function runs the actual man command and the preceding lines set the colour etc.

Then just load the profile.

$ source ~/.bashrc

And you will get coloured output whenever you read a man page in the terminal.