Colored man pages not working on gentoo
Could be a number of problems.
Seeing as you're using zsh, try putting this in your ~/.zshrc:
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;47;34m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'
export LESS=-r
Then open a new terminal window and try running
man ls
if it's not working, run each of the following to find out where the problem is:
Number 1
typeset -p LESS_TERMCAP_md | cat -v
should print
typeset -x LESS_TERMCAP_md="^[[01;31m"
and
typeset -p LESS
should print
typeset -x LESS="-r"
if not, you put the export LESS stuff in the wrong file.
Number 2
echo "${LESS_TERMCAP_md}red${LESS_TERMCAP_me}"
should print
red
in a red color. If it doesn't there is something wrong with your terminal settings. Check your terminal settings (e.g. ~/.Xresources) or try running gnome-terminal or xterm and see if that works.
Number 3
echo -E "a^Ha" | LESS= less -r
(^H must be entered by pressing Ctrl+V then Ctrl+H)
should print
a
in red. If it doesn't, please run these
type less
less --version
and paste the output back in your question.
Number 4
bzcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bz2 | \
/bin/sh /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 | head -n 5 | cat -v
should print
LS(1) User Commands LS(1)
N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE
(note the ^H like in step number 3)
if it's printing something like:
LS(1) User Commands LS(1)
^[[1mNAME^[[0m
instead, you will need to find a way to disable "sgr escape sequences". The easiest thing to try is adding export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 to .zshrc, but there are other ways of fixing this.
Number 5
bzcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bz2 | \
/bin/sh /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 | less
should display the ls man page with colors.
man ls
should now be working!
Having read Mikels answer, its very comprehensive, and will hopefully work on all systems, but its probably overkill for myself ( also on a gentoo system. )
So here is a result for people who are very "Do long, didn't read" with all that shenanigans.
The Bare minimum I could do to get Coloured Man pages is as follows:
LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' GROFF_NO_SGR=1 man man
This renders text that was previously only in bold, in bold and red. ( The red characterised by the '31' in LESS_TERMCAP_md )
LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;32m'
These 2 rules control the formatting of the current line number display, and coerce it to rendering in Green.
LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;33m' LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
These 2 rules move everything that was previously underlined, to being underlined and yellow. ( 04 is 'underlined', 33 is "yellow" )