Disable color in shell/terminal

Question

I want to disable all color in my shell. Not ls, not nano, not vi, nothing. What's the best way to achieve this?

Answer 1

if you are using PUTTY to remotely access the shell, then:
- on the left panel, click Colors
- uncheck the three boxes on the right panel (they are checked by default)

Answer 2

unset LS_COLORS; export TERM=xterm should do it, or at least get you most of the way there. You may need to change that to say TERM=vt220 for some overly "smart" programs.

Answer 3

xterm -cm

This will start an xterm with no colors.

Answer 4

I encountered the same problem while writing an SSH robot in Python (colors came out as jibberish when run through Visual Studio). The simplest solution was to open a new shell inside the other shell that was running.

sh

This opened a fresh shell without any of my settings and all printouts was monochrome. It also reset the prompt which was a bonus for my intended purpose.

Answer 5

make a backup of .bashrc and then open .bashrc and remove all of these lines. this has the added benefit of disabling text colors in gedit!

set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)

case "$TERM" in xterm|xterm-color|*-256color) color_prompt=yes;; esac

uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned

off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window

should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt

force_color_prompt=yes

if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48 # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.) color_prompt=yes else color_prompt= fi fi

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[\033[01;31m]\h[\033[01;34m] \W \$[\033[00m] ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[\033[01;32m]\u@\h[\033[00m] [\033[01;34m]\w \$[\033[00m] ' fi else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h \w \$ ' fi unset color_prompt force_color_prompt 42a70,89

If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir

case "$TERM" in xterm*|rxvt*) PS1="[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h \w\a]$PS1" ;; *) ;; esac

enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases

if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto'

alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'

fi