Colors in Emacs shell prompt

Question

Is it possible to use colors in the Emacs shell prompt (the prompt itself, not the rest of the shell screen) with the bash PS1 variable? I believe I have the syntax correct

Answer 1

Figured it out: The comint-highlight-prompt face was set to inherit from minibuffer-prompt, which was setting the :weight, :foreground and :background. Removing the inheritance prevented the colors set in PS1 from being overridden by the comint-highlight-prompt face. Added this to my .emacs file.

(set-face-attribute 'comint-highlight-prompt nil
                    :inherit nil)

Also, M-x customize-group <ret> font-lock-faces was helpful in figuring this out.

Answer 2

I would recommend not to change the face globally (since there are many comint users besides shell mode) but in a buffer specific manner by setting a mode hook:

(add-hook 'shell-mode-hook
      (lambda ()
        (face-remap-set-base 'comint-highlight-prompt :inherit nil)))

Answer 3

You'll need to use ansi-term rather than shell for terminal colours.

Answer 4

I use that to change the terminal color and the information in mac, maybe can help:

Cyan="$(tput setaf 6)"
NC="$(tput sgr0)" # No Color
export PS1="$Cyan.Where-> \w\n\\$\[$NC\]"