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All terminal windows for Linux understand Ansi color codes
and with these codes it is possible to have colors in the shell prompt.
<br>
<br>
The color codes are:
<ul>
<li>Foreground colors: 30=black, 31=red, 32=green, 33=yellow, 34=blue
   35=purple, 36=turquoise, 37=white
<li>Background colors: 0=transparent, 40=back, 41=red, 42=green, 43=yellow, 44=blue
   45=purple, 46=turquoise, 47=white
</ul>
The syntax to print the codes is &quot;Esc[background;foreground;1m&quot; for
bold print and &quot;Esc[background;foreground m&quot; for normal print.
The Esc is a literal Esc character (octal 33). The coloring is switched off with
&quot;Esc[m&quot;
<p>
This command prints e.g Linux in yellow on a red background:
<br><tt>/bin/echo '\033[41;33;1m Linux \033[m'</tt><br>
Just try it out copying the command into the next shell.
</p>
<p>
To insert special characters such as (a literal Esc) into the shell prompt
you must include them in %{ %} for tcsh and \[ \] for bash
</p>
<p>
This gives e.g the tcsh prompt that you can see in the picture above:<br>
<tt>set prompt='%{^[[44;33;1m%}%!\-%n@%m%{^[[m%} \n%{^[[44;37;1m%}(%~)%#%{^[[m%} '</tt>
<br>
<br>
A yellow prompt for bash is e.g:<br>
<tt>PS1='\[^[[40;33;1m\]\u@\h:\w\$\[^[[m\] '</tt>
<br>
<br>
In both cases the literal Esc character is shown as ^[. Note: You can not
copy and paste these lines from the web browser to the shell. To get a literal
Esc in Vi you type crtl-v Esc and in Emacs this is crtl-q Esc.
</p>
<p>
Happy color command prompts!
</p>