How to Customize the lsd Command Color Theme: A Step-by-Step Guide

lsd is an alternative command for ls that displays illustrative icons beside each of the items listed in the output. It also colorizes its output to make it even more clear what sort of files or properties the directory contains. However, the default color theme might not necessarily look readable on your terminal.

This short article shows how you can change the default coloring of the output of lsd command.

Create the config file

Like many other command line tools, lsd reads its setting from a simple config file. By default, lsd would look for its config file inside the .config/lsd/ path of your system home directory. The file format should be of type yaml (or yml). On a linux distro, you can create this config file using the following command:

touch ~/.config/lsd/config.yaml

Add the config file content

There are a ton of options we can set in this config file. However, the one we’re interested in is the color option. Go on with adding the following lines of code to the config.yaml file.

color:
  # When to colorize the output.
  # When "classic" is set, this is set to "never".
  # Possible values: never, auto, always
  when: auto
  # How to colorize the output.
  # When "classic" is set, this is set to "no-color".
  # Possible values: default, custom
  # When "custom" is set, lsd will look in the config directory for `colors.yaml`.
  theme: custom

Create colors file

Since there are many fields we can change the color for, we need to create another file specifically for this purpose.

touch ~/.config/lsd/colors.yaml

config.yaml and colors.yaml files are the only files you need to create. So, the path and file structure of the lsd config directory would now look like this:

❯ tree ~/.config/lsd
/home/saeed/.config/lsd
├── colors.yaml
└── config.yaml

1 directory, 2 files

Add the fields and custom colors

Default theme color of lsd uses the following colors for each field.

user: 230
group: 187
permission:
  read: dark_green
  write: dark_yellow
  exec: dark_red
  exec-sticky: 5
  no-access: 245
  octal: 6
  acl: dark_cyan
  context: cyan
date:
  hour-old: 40
  day-old: 42
  older: 36
size:
  none: 245
  small: 229
  medium: 216
  large: 172
inode:
  valid: 13
  invalid: 245
links:
  valid: 13
  invalid: 245
tree-edge: 245
git-status:
  default: 245
  unmodified: 245
  ignored: 245
  new-in-index: dark_green
  new-in-workdir: dark_green
  typechange: dark_yellow
  deleted: dark_red
  renamed: dark_green
  modified: dark_yellow
  conflicted: dark_red

You can add the entire code above to colors.yaml file and change the ones you like or just alter the options you’re intersted in and discard the other options. Keep in mind that in yaml format the indentation matters. Also, you need to keep the parent node (lesser indented node) in place if you’re going to change one of its child nodes.

One weird thing about the content of this file (at least for me) was the use of color codes in a format I wasn’t already familiar with. These colors are expressed as single numbers from Xtrem-256color colors. These 256 colors are the ones that your terminal can support. Use this Wikimedia page to find or select your desired color.

Finally, note that you DON’T need to restart the terminal or source the lsd config files to effectively apply the changes you make. The changes will be immediatelly applied.

If you need to learn more about lsd you can refer to its github page.