I was becoming fairly frustrated with terminal.app because it would not do a good job of displaying ANSI color. I found a hack that would let me display colors with ls, but mutt, lynx, emacs and so on would stubbornly stay in black and white. The solution is to make the proper terminfo file for a VT100 terminal (which is what terminal.app more or less emulates) with color support.
Read the rest of the article for the how-to...
To do this, grab the files vt100-color.txt and termcap-vt100-color and download them to your home directory. Now, fire up a terminal, and run the following commands (all commands are given in csh syntax since, lamentably, it is the default shell). Make sure you aren't nuking any files you already have there before proceeding:
% mv ~/termcap-vt100-color ~/.termcap[Note: In order to run the 'tic' command, you'll need to have 'ncurses' installed and functional. The easiest way to do this is through fink, if you have it installed. Either 'sudo apt-get install ncurses' for the pre-compiled version or 'sudo fink install ncurses' to download and install from source. If you don't have fink installed, you're on your own!]
% mkdir ~/.terminfo
% setenv TERMINFO "$HOME/.terminfo"
% tic vt100-color.txt
% ls .terminfo/vshould show a file called vt100-color. The only thing left to do is edit ~/.cshrc and add a line:
setenv TERM vt100-colorYou will most likely need to reproduce the above steps (all except for editing .cshrc) for any machine you wish to log into (via, e.g., ssh) and have color capabilities on.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020408225741777