Is your Mac up to date with the latest version of the Mac operating system? Is it using the version required by a product that you want to use with your Mac? Which versions are earlier (older) or later (newer, more recent)? To find out, learn which version is installed now.
For colors with the actual ls command, set the CLICOLOR environment variable on OSX, and also set LSCOLORS (see the manual for the format) if you want to change the colors. To change the color of these user interface items, follow these steps: Choose Command→System Preferences and click the General icon. Or, Control-click the System Preferences icon on the Dock and choose General from the menu that opens. The General preferences pane appears, as shown in this figure.
If your macOS isn't up to date, you may be able to update to a later version.
Which macOS version is installed?
From the Apple menu in the corner of your screen, choose About This Mac. You should see the macOS name, such as macOS Big Sur, followed by its version number. If you need to know the build number as well, click the version number to see it.
Which macOS version is the latest?
These are all Mac operating systems, starting with the most recent. When a major new macOS is released, it gets a new name, such as macOS Big Sur. As updates that change the macOS version number become available, this article is updated to show the latest version of that macOS.
If your Mac is using an earlier version of any Mac operating system, you should install the latest Apple software updates, which can include important security updates and updates for the apps that are installed by macOS, such as Safari, Books, Messages, Mail, Music, Calendar, and Photos.
macOS
Latest version
macOS Big Sur
11.3
macOS Catalina
10.15.7
macOS Mojave
10.14.6
macOS High Sierra
10.13.6
macOS Sierra
10.12.6
OS X El Capitan
10.11.6
OS X Yosemite
10.10.5
OS X Mavericks
10.9.5
OS X Mountain Lion
10.8.5
OS X Lion
10.7.5
Mac OS X Snow Leopard
10.6.8
Mac OS X Leopard
10.5.8
Mac OS X Tiger
10.4.11
Mac OS X Panther
10.3.9
Mac OS X Jaguar
10.2.8
Mac OS X Puma
10.1.5
Mac OS X Cheetah
10.0.4
Okay, so I just spent the better part of 2 hours bashing my head into a wall trying to get ls to color properly. If you’re not with me now, probably skip the rest of this post as it’s aimed at my geek followers.
Mac Os Download
In a hurry? I’ll recap my solution in the summary.
Okay, so I’m browsing around in my terminal when I run `ls /dev`. Turns out that directory is full of files of type ‘block special character’ and ‘character special file’. Well, it just so happens that my color scheme that I’ve struggled a lot with shows these as grey text on a yellow or light blue background, respectively. The net is that the files are totally unreadable.
So, I of course try to fix this, find my entry for LS_COLORS in my .zshrc file, and away I go … or not. First of all, I’ve never editing the LS_COLORS before, I’ve always just stolen one from somewhere else. Here’s what I had:
Looks great! Except that somewhere in that mess are a couple of numbers messing up my color scheme. So, first up: how does that work? The extensions are kind of easy to reason out, but then there are some special, two-letter patterns at the beginning. Well, ‘bd’ is the type I was looking for (the ‘block special character’). I figured that out after finding this.
Oh, and backing up for a minute, I knew the offending files’ types by looking up the first character of ‘ls -l’. Here’s the section of the ls man page for reference:
So, as an example, both these entries are diretories, wich you can tell from teh first character:
Anyway, back to the frustrat–err, learning experience. So, I start mucking around with the LS_COLORS variables, and can’t get changes to take. I progressively make more and more drastic changes, open a new shell, only to see that the colorscheme remains the same.
An hour later, I’m now discovering a new-fangled os x style of color codes, which really just looks like a glob of letters:
Well, how to set this all up is in the ls man pages, but nothing seems to be working for me. Here’s the relevant section from the ls man page:
Okay, so, looks like I have all the pieces, but I’m still really struggling when I had the ‘aha’ moment — I’m using screen. screen doesn’t reevaluate terminal colors each time you run zsh the way a terminal does. I got onto this line of thought after reading an article from macworld.
Once I went back to a raw terminal to test my changes, I was good to go. When I restarted screen, it picked up my colors from the terminal, and now I’m good. I ended up using pretty normal colors for the file types that were giving me problems:
My zshrc is almost completely platform independent, but I doubt this is very portable. Maybe I’ll come back to it.
Summary
So, inclusion:
Exit screen before messing with colors
Read the ls man page to make sure that you’re:
changing the correct variable (LSCOLORS in Mac OS X)
representing your desired colors in the desired format
Lost Colors Mac Os 11
As always, you can find my current shell setup files on github.
About softwaregravy
Lost Colors Mac Os 11
Software Engineer, aspiring financial guru, and entrepreneur; all mixed with a bit of awesome.
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