How do zsh ansi colour codes work?

Question

I want to make my hostname in my terminal orange. How do I do that?

Answer 1

First off, I'm not sure what terminal you're using or if it will even support the color orange. Mine supports the following: Red, Blue, Green, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Black & White. And here's how I get colors in my terminal:

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You need to first load the colors using autoload. I use the following to load the colors and assign them to meaningful names

#load colors
autoload colors && colors
for COLOR in RED GREEN YELLOW BLUE MAGENTA CYAN BLACK WHITE; do
    eval $COLOR='%{$fg_no_bold[${(L)COLOR}]%}'  #wrap colours between %{ %} to avoid weird gaps in autocomplete
    eval BOLD_$COLOR='%{$fg_bold[${(L)COLOR}]%}'
done
eval RESET='%{$reset_color%}'

You can set the hostname in your prompt using the %m string. So to set, say a red hostname, you'd do

${RED}%m${WHITE}\>

which will print something like bneil.so>