Terminal manual not explaining the colour scheme

[Ari Torhamo]

I tried to find an explanation in Gnome-terminal manual for different colours
that are used in the terminal window to code listed items or differentiate
(don't know the right word in english - sorry) between them. I read through the
manual, but only found an explanation for how to change the colour scheme, but
not what do the different colours actually mean. I think that it would be
usefull and even natural to have the meaning of these different colours
explained in the manual (which in general seems thorough to me).

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I'm not sure what you mean by the "meaning" of the colours. Can you elaborate?

[Vincent Untz (vuntz)]

Are you talking about the color palette?

[Ari Torhamo (ari-torhamo)]

This is strange - I replied here to Matt Zimmerman's question a few days ago,
but my reply seems to have disappeared. I try again to explain myself and if
this doesn't make sense to you, it's allright for me you to remove this whole
report :-)

When I list the content of a directory, I see that the listed items are
presented in different colours. I notice that directories are presented in blue
and the png-images on my desktop are purple. Some files seem to have no special
colour at all, like html-files, which are just black. When I move around in the
directory system, I find that even more colours are used: in usr/bin green
colour for executables? light blue for something. Moving around further I see
even more colours for different files. When one sees a different colour, one
sees a different type of file. What is missing in the manual is the explanation
for these different colours - like:

blue -folder
purple -image
black -text, html
green -?
red -?

When someone new to terminal starts using it, these colours are one of the first
things to catch his/hers attention. He naturally starts to wonder, what the
different colours are for. What does this newbie do first (if he does what most
would like him to do) - he refers to the manual. But this is a one thing that is
not explained there.

[Vincent Untz (vuntz)]

What you're asking for is documentation about how each program uses the colors.
I don't think this can be in the documentation of gnome-terminal...

[Ari Torhamo (ari-torhamo)]

No. I'm asking for documentation for how Gnome-terminal is using colors in file
listings. Isn't that a property of Gnome-terminal? I'm feeling that I'm not
getting understood here, which propably is just because I can't explain what I
mean properly in english.

If you could be kind and remove this report. I don't have anything more to say
about this and after all it's just about documentation and newbie stuff. You
people have more serious things to think about :-)

Thank you for your attention.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

No, that is not a property of gnome-terminal. gnome-terminal simply provides a
text-based interface to programs, and the programs that you run inside it are
independent of gnome-terminal. For example, when you run the 'ls' command, that
is a program provided as part of the GNU coreutils package, which is written,
maintained and distributed entirely separately from gnome-terminal, and has its
own documentation.

[Ari Torhamo (ari-torhamo)]

OK, now I think I get it. Gnome-terminal in a way just lets you through the GUI
and gives you the command line (bash?), without doing any formatting in between.
At the command line you enter different commands, which start separate,
independent programs (this I in fact have read somewere, but wasn't able to make
a connection to this case). And apparently each program has it's own way of
using colors to code things. I tried this using the command "find", which
doesn't seem to use colors at all.

My only excuse for this silly request is that I have only few times actually
used Linux in text mode. An exception being when I did apt-get install Synaptic
after installing Fedora and once when I had a problem and got help from forums
in form of some CLI-commands.

I thank you for being patient in trying to understand what on earth am I talking
about :) and I'll try to send more usefull feature requests in the future (and
do more homework before sending).

Ari

P.S. I marked this request resolved. I don't know, if it's me who's supposed to
do that - I found nothing about it in the Bug Writing Guidelines.