Terminal Colors Not Working

Solution 1:

There is a sample, default .bashrc file located in /etc/skel - you could make a backup of your current .bashrc with mv .bashrc .bashrc.bak and then cp /etc/skel/.bashrc .bashrc to copy that sample back to your home directory. After that, un-comment force_color_prompt=yes in the new file and add [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" back to the end (last line) of the file so that RVM still works.

After that, execute . .bashrc at a prompt to reload your bash profile, which should give you a colored prompt again and test RVM with the command type rvm | head -1 which should return the text: rvm is a function

If this doesn't work, please let us know if you are using the standard Terminal app on Mac OS X, and what profile you are using in Terminal on your Mac.

Solution 2:

The colors have stopped working, most probably after you upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard.

In Lion, for some reason, by default the terminal is declared as "xterm-256color" instead of "xterm-color" which is what Ubuntu understands.

One of the options is for you, as mentioned by previous responders, uncomment force_color_prompt=yes in ~/.bashrc

The other option is to redeclare in Terminal.app the terminal as xterm-color. Here's how to do that:

1. Launch Terminal.app
2. Go to menu Terminal -> Preferences (or use Cmd + ,)
3. Go to the Settings tab and find the theme that is set as default
4. Go to the Advanced tab
5. Find the drop down next to Declare terminal as: and set it to xterm-color

Here are my Settings

UPDATE: It seems that Mountain Lion removed the xterm-color option completely from the drop down menu. If you're doing an upgrade you will most probably keep your old configuration, but if you are doing a fresh install, you'll have to manually edit Terminal's configuration file and for that you will need a plist editor (included in XCode that need to be installed via the App Store). The location of Terminal's file is in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist in order to add the xterm-color option do the following:

1. Quit Terminal.app if it's currently running
2. Install XCode from the App Store (skip this step if you have installed it already)
3. $ open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist
4. Navigate the plist to Root > Window Settings
5. locate the name of your default theme (in my case that’s Pro) expand it and find the TerminalType key.
6. Now just change the TerminalType key to xterm-color manually
7. save the file and launch Terminal.