I took several pieces of bash configuration from the net and use them as follow to be more productive with my terminal. A must have setting !

Thanks to this setting, you can get colored path and files, full completion (e.g when using sudo or apt-*) and some convenient aliases.

Here is the corresponding .bashrc (must be in the root of your home directory) :

test -s ~/.alias && . ~/.alias || true
export PATH="/opt/mono-1.1.15/bin:$PATH"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/mono-1.1.15/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export MANPATH="/opt/mono-1.1.15/share/man:$MANPATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/mono-1.1.15/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
ROUGE='\[\033[0;31m\]'
MARRON='\[\033[0;33m\]'
NOC='\[\033[0;0m\]'
PS1="$MARRON[\u@\h:$ROUGE\w$MARRON] \$ $NOC"
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi
alias cp="cp -i"
alias mv="mv -i"
alias rm="rm -i"
alias ls="ls --color='always'"
alias dir="dir --color='always'"
alias grep="grep --color='always'"
alias md="mkdir"
alias rd="rmdir"
alias cd..='cd ..'
alias glxgears="glxgears -printfps"
alias cdrom="mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom"
alias ll="ls -alh"
alias la="ls -a"
alias screenshot="import -pause 5 -window root"

Here is the content of an .inputrc file (as well in your home directory), that you have to create to get the bash not case sensitive during the completion (very convenient) :

set completion-ignore-case on

Oh and have you ever tried zsh ? I tried recently. It is definitely a great shell, much improved compared to bash. I have been using it for a while, but didn’t like the way it manages the [del] key.

I guess there must be a solution but haven’t looked for that yet. I will update you if I find it… or do you know how to ?

Let’s finish with vim. Just create a .vimrc file, containing this line :

:syntax on

Isn’t the terminal much more pretty like that ? Why isn’t it a default setting ?