vivid

vivid is a generator for the LS_COLORS environment variable, which controls colorized output in ls, tree, fd, bfs, dust and other tools. You run vivid generate <theme> and export the result in your shell RC file, for example export LS_COLORS="$(vivid generate molokai)". Fish is supported with set -gx LS_COLORS (vivid generate molokai).

Unlike dircolors, vivid keeps the filetype database and the color themes in separate YAML files. This lets you change or customize a theme without touching the list of file extensions. Colors are written in RRGGBB format instead of raw ANSI escape codes. vivid translates them to 24-bit truecolor codes by default, or to interpolated 8-bit codes with --color-mode 8-bit (-m 8-bit) for terminals without truecolor support.

Bundled themes include snazzy, molokai, ayu and lava. vivid themes lists all available themes. An ansi theme uses your terminal's 16-color palette, so colors follow your terminal theme when you switch between light and dark mode. Custom filetypes.yml databases can be placed in /usr/share/vivid, $HOME/.config/vivid or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vivid on POSIX systems, or in %APPDATA%\vivid on Windows. Custom themes go in a themes subfolder, or you can pass a path directly with vivid generate path/to/my_theme.yml.

It is aimed at developers and sysadmins who want consistent, customizable file-type coloring in the terminal. On macOS, the BSD ls ignores LS_COLORS, so the README suggests using GNU ls from coreutils.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install vivid

# via Arch Linux (pacman)
pacman -S vivid

# via Cargo
cargo install vivid