Coloring Zsh

Question

I have a lot of questions about coloring zsh. I've read a LOT about coloring zsh and simply can't grasp some of the concepts. Here is my current ~/.zshrc:
# Lines configured by zsh-newuser-install
HISTFILE=~/.histfile
HISTSIZE=1000
SAVEHIST=1000
setopt appendhistory autocd
unsetopt extendedglob
bindkey -e
# End of lines configured by zsh-newuser-install
# The following lines were added by compinstall
zstyle :compinstall filename '/home/clarence/.zshrc'
autoload -U colors && colors
autoload -U promptinit
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit
# End of lines added by compinstall
[[ $- != *i* ]] && return
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
PROMPT="%{$fg[white]%}[%{$fg[blue]%}%n%{$fg[white]%}@%{$fg[white]%}%m %{$fg[white]%}%1~]$ "
Here is my goal: To be able to look at my ~/.zshrc and know exactly what all of it means and be able to manipulate it into using the 256-colors that I want.
I would like to be able to use a brighter blue for my name and some light/darker greys for some of the other parts but it seems I'm limited to simple colors and not 256-colors. From what I understand the "autoload -U colors && colors" section of my ~/.zshrc has something to do with the colors I am able to use. I would like to know how to be able to use colors like light blue and grey.
Another issue is that when I use nano on zsh the text is black and that doesn't work out very well since I have a black background :S I have the same problem with reading man pages. I would like to know how to change the colors for that text too.
If anyone can translate my ~/.zshrc and walk me through the steps of complete customization, I would be very thankful. Oh, I'm using urxvt too if that is of any count. Thanks in advance!
Edit: Removed the big picture.
Last edited by Clarence.e.a (2012-04-28 20:58:27)

Answer 1

I read on the wiki that most doesn't have a user-specific configuration file by default, and I did create that, I just copied the one from /usr/share/doc/most/most.rc to ~/, but the thing is that when I didn't have a ~/.mostrc I could see the effects, some orange/green/cyan text so I knew it was working and reading off of a system-wide config file, and it had a transparent background. Since I added the ~/.mostrc file it doesn't have a transparent background and it's kind of annoying. I wanted to look at the system-wide config file so I could see what they did to give it a transparent background. By the way, thanks for the tip about looking at the package database, that will definitely come in handy later, but this time it still didn't point me to a system-wide config file.
Since I included that path file in ~/.nanorc I can see similar effects of most, syntax being colored green and orange, but the normal text is still black and pretty hard to read. Here is the specific section I want to change in ~/.nanorc to get an overall white foreground and transparent background, but every time I change it I get the "cannot add a color command without a syntax command" error, even though I included the syntax line in ~/.nanorc.
## Color setup
## Format:
## syntax "short description" ["filename regex" ...]
## The "none" syntax is reserved; specifying it on the command line is
## the same as not having a syntax at all. The "default" syntax is
## special: it takes no filename regexes, and applies to files that
## don't match any other syntax's filename regexes.
## color foreground,background "regex" ["regex"...]
## or
## icolor foreground,background "regex" ["regex"...]
## "color" will do case sensitive matches, while "icolor" will do case
## insensitive matches.
## Valid colors: white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, cyan.
## For foreground colors, you may use the prefix "bright" to get a
## stronger highlight.
## To use multi-line regexes, use the start="regex" end="regex"
## [start="regex" end="regex"...] format.
## If your system supports transparency, not specifying a background
## color will use a transparent color. If you don't want this, be sure
## to set the background color to black or white.
## If you wish, you may put your syntaxes in separate files. You can
## make use of such files (which can only include "syntax", "color", and
## "icolor" commands) as follows:
include "/usr/share/nano/sh.nanorc"
## Unless otherwise noted, the name of the syntax file (without the
## ".nanorc" extension) should be the same as the "short description"
## name inside that file. These names are kept fairly short to make
## them easier to remember and faster to type using nano's -Y option.
## All regexes should be extended regular expressions.
About the alsamixer thing, I didn't think it would be TOO hard, but if you say so I should probably put that off until later.
Thanks for the help,
Clarence