I spent a good portion of yesterday obsessing over my grep colors. They worked fine on my VM (Ubuntu) but not on my mac. I then figured out that mac is FreeBSD and Linux grep is GNU. So the export GREP_COLORS='1;32' just isn't going to work.

I then spent too much time trying to get that to work when all the Stackoverflow sources said just use ack. So I gave in and installed it because I was tired of doing it "the hard way".

It's amazing. I know most of you probably already use ack. If you don't you are "doing it wrong" as I have been for some time. Now stop wasting time reading this and go download it. 

Installation instructions here.

Colors and line numbers are on by default! Yay! To change the colors simple add this to your .bash_profile or whatever your preference:

alias ack='ack --color-filename="red bold" --color-match="yellow bold" --color-lineno=white'

You're welcome.