color coding mac terminal

You can change your shell colors in Terminal's preferences.

With these settings, you get these colors (not usually using colored ls, so I don't care):

I don't understand what the issue is here. Colored command output is active by default. The only thing you can/need to do yourself is give normal and bold text different default colors, and actually use the colored variants (e.g. ls -G) of your commands.

For vim: :syntax on in vim. Or append syntax on to .vimrc.

Add, these lines to the end of your ~/.bash_profile

alias ls='ls -G'
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=Gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad

As you can see, customizing them is a bit of a pain, but there's a website that helps with that... http://geoff.greer.fm/lscolors/

Now when you open the Terminal it will have colors in ls

Use the -G switch to ls on Mac:

ls -G

If you'd like the standard ls to always be colored, add this to your ~/.bash_profile:

alias ls='ls -G'