Like most things, it's a matter of preference. Personally I try to make the colours as customisable as possible, and avoid using them purely for cosmetic purposes (i.e., if something is coloured, that colour has a specific meaning).
I use five colours in prompts - these are the default colour (usually white), and four scaled colours (defaulted to cyan, blue, magenta and red). Things like health, mana and action points use the scaled colour as a percentage indicator (with each colour also representing a pain penalty level). Boolean options use only the two extremes of the scale, but it provides the same benefit - it lets you see the important information at a glance.
For the actual descriptions I don't use colour (except highlighting for the title), but I use it extensively for the ascii maps (including the one displayed alongside the description). In my opinion it's much easier to see that "." represents plains and "~" represents rivers when the former is coloured green and the latter blue.
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