Pacman is the package manager in Linux Arch and Linux Arch-based distributions.

I’ve been using EndeavourOS for some time, and I enjoy it. EndeavourOS is pretty close to vanilla Arch. I also experimented with pure Arch (more on that in future blog posts). However, the output of pacman in EndeavourOS is much more excellent and “eye candy” than in Arch. However, it’s just a matter of configuring /etc/pacman.conf a bit in Arch to have the “eye candy” output.

These are the options to enable in the [options] section in that file (the ParallelDownloads does not have to with the output, but it’s a nice optimization):

Without these options, this is the output of pacman (e.g., during an upgrade):

And this is the output with the options above enabled:

Besides the colors, you can spot c’s for the progress representing “Pacman,” the video-game character, eating candies (that’s the aim of the option ILoveCandy)… waka waka waka!  🙂

The colors are also helpful when searching for packages:

Happy Pacman! 🙂