How to fix ESC[ in your terminal
I don’t know exactly what happened the other day, but I ran a git diff and instead of the usual red and green colors, everything was some form of ESC[32m ESC[1m ESC[m and so on in order to tell the terminal to switch colors.
ESC[1mindex 6008531..985ce31 100755ESC[m
ESC[1m--- a/bin/build-site.pyESC[m
ESC[1m b/bin/build-site.pyESC[m
ESC[36m@@ -1,5 1,9 @@ESC[m
#!/usr/bin/env pythonESC[m
ESC[m
ESC[32m ESC[m
ESC[32m ESC[m
ESC[32m ESC[m
ESC[32m ESC[m
import getoptESC[m
import gitESC[m
import osESC[m
Okay this is just great. No idea what is going on, and I can’t possibly continue coding like this. After a bit of googling, there wasn’t much on the situation.
It turns out that the less command got misconfigured. I was working on Ubuntu and found the culprit to be the $LESS environment variable misconfigured.
$ echo $LESS
-eiMX
$ export LESS="-eirMX"
These two commands in terminal will print out the $LESS environment variable and then set it. The “r” option is what is crucial here. It’s what enables coloring in less output. Another environment variable you may look at is $PAGER.
Take a look here for a really good description of the problem: