what is this?

It's a wrapper around the dircolors(1) GNU core utility, allowing users to set up their terminal for colored output from ls or any other external program that uses the LS_COLORS environment variable to color output.

Specification is the same as a traditional dir_colors configuration file, but with the ability to specify hex color codes for the foregrounds and backgrounds of files. This is easier understood with an example. To highlight executables with a vampirish black foreground and a lime green background, instead of writing:

EXEC 38;2;8;8;8;48;2;50;205;50

We can write:

EXEC #080808 #32CD32

And that's it. The wrapper just converts any 3 or 6 digit hex color code to the corresponding ANSI escaped RGB color sequence to be used with terminals supporting 24-bits of color.

how do i use it

The bundled binary script is available under bin/dircolors.hex. Don't use the scripts in the root of this repository.

For example:

$ echo 'EXEC #080808 #32CD32' > /tmp/dircolors
$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andreykaipov/dircolors.hex/master/bin/dircolors.hex | sh -s /tmp/dircolors
LS_COLORS='ex=38;2;8;8;8;48;2;50;205;50:';
export LS_COLORS

dependencies

• AWK

why?

Personally I think it's easier maintaining colors in hex, especially since so many editors support previewing hex colors over ANSI escaped color sequences out of the box.

limitations

• You can't specify just a background, i.e. if you want to specify a background, you must specify a foreground too.