A little color makes the Linux command line easier to read. Juliet Kemp shows how easy it is to add a little color to your command shell.

"I spend a lot of time working in front of a screen (many hours in a dimly lit room) and eye fatigue is an issue. A consistent color scheme, especially one which is easy on the eyes, is important — and it also helps to have way of doing that where the directives are not all scattered all over my Emacs-lisp setup. Enter Emacs Color Themes, available as the Debian package emacs-goodies.

First of all, what’s color management? Color management is a process that allows you to achieve consistent color representations across different devices, such as digital cameras, scanners, printers, and monitors. The key concept in color management is color space -- a model that describes the way colors can be represented as numbers.

I use the Linux command line extensively, both on my local machine or when I’m connected to a remote server. There are some keyboard shortcuts that I want to share with you which have made my life on BASH a lot easier. I have not come across too many books that have documented these shortcuts and I think they are quite important to improve your productivity while on the command line.

Adding a pinch of color to code fragments in a Writer document can make it easier to read. But coloring code by hand is a rather daunting proposition...

The Bash Shell reads command line until it reaches a carriage-return. This permits the user to create very long command strings if necessary.

I love the command line. However, most people can’t just live on the command line, GUI’s can be pretty useful :P. I find myself spawning GUI programs from the command line a lot, and here are two tips which make doing that a pleasant experience:

Conventional wisdom states that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are easy and the command line is hard. Conventional wisdom isn’t always right.

If you do any web design, interior design, painting, graphic arts you know the importance of using complimentary color schemes. For many this is as simple as eying a color. Agave does one thing: It helps you create color schemes that match.