Emacs Shell Ansi Colors

In a previous post I mentioned a funky character encoding issue with my Emacs Autotest output. I finally looked into the cause and came across the solution. I just needed to enable ansi-colors in my Emacs shell.

In your .emacs file, add the following:

;; Add color to a shell running in emacs 'M-x shell'
(autoload 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on "ansi-color" nil t)
(add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)

Cheap and easy. Now, you’ll get all the cool ansi colors, like the kids.