Have a bit of time waiting for clients to arrive... guess I'll spam for kicks!!
@Mamba
I think safetycopy's Vim related links should give you a good start in that area.
Now, with regards to bash and it's PS1 prompt..etc;
I assume you're on Debian or #! Statler using it's default Bash shell (as opposed to ZSH or KSH), so I grabbed the .bashrc included in Statler and modified it, to make it a touch easier for you to grasp, and also because I suck at explaining stuff from scratch and prefer using examples instead >_<
Around a year ago, I decided my cranium had better stuff to remember than those weird rhythm-challenged term ANSI numbers, so I did some reading around the Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch forums, added a bit of of my own nonsense, and ended up with this;
# ANSI color codes
RS="\[\033[0m\]" # reset
HC="\[\033[1m\]" # hicolor
UL="\[\033[4m\]" # underline
INV="\[\033[7m\]" # inverse background and foreground
FBLK="\[\033[30m\]" # foreground black
FRED="\[\033[31m\]" # foreground red
FGRN="\[\033[32m\]" # foreground green
FYEL="\[\033[33m\]" # foreground yellow
FBLE="\[\033[34m\]" # foreground blue
FMAG="\[\033[35m\]" # foreground magenta
FCYN="\[\033[36m\]" # foreground cyan
FWHT="\[\033[37m\]" # foreground white
BBLK="\[\033[40m\]" # background black
BRED="\[\033[41m\]" # background red
BGRN="\[\033[42m\]" # background green
BYEL="\[\033[43m\]" # background yellow
BBLE="\[\033[44m\]" # background blue
BMAG="\[\033[45m\]" # background magenta
BCYN="\[\033[46m\]" # background cyan
BWHT="\[\033[47m\]" # background white
Basically, we're sort of aliasing the escape codes (or whatever they're called).
You insert that bit into your .bashrc, before any PS1 related lines.
Then you proceed to edit your PS1 accordingly, adding a $ before each color alias, which in turn should be applied before each attribute you want in the prompt .... or something like that....
Here's the standard Statler .bashrc I grabbed and added the related customizations to... it'll probably give you a better idea.
http://pastebin.com/epceAWiB
The color bits are on lines 52 - 72, and the modded PS1 and PS2 prompts are lines 84 & 85. Hope this gives you a simple enough example/start point.
I also copy-pasted some bits that give you colored man pages, lines 117 - 124, from somewhere on these forums
If you want to know what the prompt looks like, here's a recent screenshot, prompt in the center of the screen. My preferred terminal emulator is Urxvt (rxvt-unicode), btw.
For an example .Xdefaults colorscheme, refer to Tartan's awesome (yet under-visited) thread over at the Tips & Tricks section:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … creenshot/ (edit: Oops, safetycopy already pointed this one out, it seems)
Edit:
Some additional reference that might interest you;
Reading the article rstcogburn linked to is advisable before you click these,
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdefaults
http://www.gilesorr.com/bashprompt/prompts/
http://bashish.sourceforge.net/
INB4-U-MOVE-2-ZSH 
Edit2:
You probably know this already, but just in case you didn't....
...all those screenshots you've seen of tilers with lots of colours, it actually involves a bit more than simple .Xdefaults and .bashrc/.zshrc editing. You also need to edit the individual config files of term apps in most cases (just like you would with Vim or Emacs). Apps like Ncmcpp, MoC, Midnight Commander, Newsbeuter, Mutt, irssi..etc all have their respective config or theme files that you can play around with.
Cheers~!!
Last edited by gutterslob (2010-11-24 10:41:10)
Point & Squirt
