Pixelbeat has published a nice article about setting up colorful console under Linux / UNIX. From the article:
I find it very productive working in a terminal environment, as it’s efficient and flexible to deal with processes and data, especially text, and especially on remote machines.
Now terminals have advanced in capability over time, with some form of “xterm” being the usual terminal of choice. Therefore one should not restrict programs to their usual monochrome defaults, as colour can be used to greatly ease the parsing of text by humans. We have dedicated sensors and portions of the brain specifically for colour, so we should not ignore them.