Vrftjkry

I am currently working on a C++ project. I am using CMake as a build system and I would love to have all the CMake related files (like CMakeLists.txt) colored differently in the ls command output. This way I could easily distinguish them from the source code files.

I was trying to both use dircolors and edit directly $LS_COLORS env var. I failed in both cases. It seems that those solutions only provide a way to color either some Linux specific files (eg. links) or selected extensions.

To sum it up, this is what I did:

OLD_LS_COLORS=$LS_COLORS # Backup

export LS_COLORS="${LS_COLORS}CMakeLists.txt=00;36:" # Adding it at the beginning of the list also fails

ls # No colors at all

export LS_COLORS=$OLD_LS_COLORS # Cleanup

dircolors -p > ~/.dir_colors

echo "CMakeLists.txt 01;33" >> ~/.dir_colors

eval `dircolors ~/.dir_colors` # Throws "unrecognized keyword CMakeLists.txt"

Workaround for my problem would be to color the source files (.hxx, .cxx) instead but I would like to stick with coloring CMake files only. On the other hand I could just color .txt and .cmake files but then all the text files would be colored in such fashion.

Coloring a Makefile (a file with no extension) in ls output would be a nice bonus.

I am using Debian 9 with bash 4.4.12 and ls 8.26.

Thanks in advance.

You can do that with ls.

*Makefile       38;5;155

*CMakeLists.txt 48;5;89;38;5;197;1;3;4;7

See https://github.com/trapd00r/LS_COLORS/blob/master/LS_COLORS

I don't know if you can do that with ls directly. (But it might be...)

My Idea would be, to pipe the output of ls to sed, which can color it's regex matches.

There is a nice snippet which does this: https://github.com/kepkin/dev-shell-essentials/blob/master/highlight.sh

You could write a chain of pipes which matches all cmake files:
ls | highlight blue CMakeLists.txt | highlight blue foobar.baz ... (and create an alias for this)

But this is of course a workaround.

My personal choice would be to use out-of-source builds and keep the cmake files seperated to a certain degree. But this is not an answer to your question and might not be possible in your project structure...