Windows Terminal

Colorful for text output [1]

ANSI-Escape-Sequences can be used to tell the Windows Terminal to print text in various colors. It is possible to define a text color and a background color. The Windows Terminal application supports the 8-Bit colors, although standard and bright colors are sometimes not differentiable (e.g. green foreground).

Hint

The Windows Console uses an old protocol named VT100 which invented in the late 70s, featuring control commands. Those were mostly used to tell the displaying terminal what to do, like cleaning the screen or position the cursor. Later, colors were supported, though only a limited set. The commands remain unchanged until today.

The valid sequences are:

Color

Foreground

Background

Black

ESC[30m

ESC[40m

Red

ESC[31m

ESC[41m

Green

ESC[32m

ESC[42m

Yellow

ESC[33m

ESC[43m

Blue

ESC[34m

ESC[44m

Violet

ESC[35m

ESC[45m

Turquoise

ESC[36m

ESC[46m

Bright Gray

ESC[37m

ESC[47m

Dark Gray

ESC[90m

ESC[100m

Bright Red

ESC[91m

ESC[101m

Bright Green

ESC[92m

ESC[102m

Bright Yellow

ESC[93m

ESC[103m

Bright Blue

ESC[94m

ESC[104m

Bright Violet

ESC[95m

ESC[105m

Bright Turquoise

ESC[96m

ESC[106m

White

ESC[97m

ESC[107m

RESET

ESC[39m

ESC[49m

Here ESC stands for the special character Escape (ASCII-Code 27, 0x1b).

Most terminals support various color schemes, which map an color code to a specific color defined in RGB values. The ColorTool from Windows Terminal, for instance, displays the default Campbell scheme like this:

../../_images/ansi_8bit_colors.png

The bright colors start with 1; (for example, 1;32m for bright green) which is another valid way to write the escape codes.

Important

Some terminals do not differentiate between standard and bright colors or use different colors schemes. So expect different results when using another Terminal. In Windows Terminal, the scheme can be defined in Settings ‣ Color Schemes. Additional themes can be downloaded from https://terminalsplash.com/ and copied into the config JSON via Settings ‣ Open JSON file (lower left corner).

  1. These sequences start with the unprintable Escape character. To enter it, create it by opening a PowerShell window and type

    PS C:\> Set-Clipboard ([char]27)

    which puts the character into the clipboard for further usage (The escape character has the ANSI-Code 27).

  2. Open the script, which is supposed to print colored text. Optionally, define the Escape character as variable. Here for batch:

    set ESC=

    where the square is the pasted Escape character (might be displayed differently, depending on the used editor)

  3. Stating an ANSI-Escape-Sequence for color changes the color from that character onwards. So to properly colorize a certain section of a printed text

    • its beginning must set the formatting to the desired color

    • at its end, the formatting must be set back to default

    Example:

    set ESC=echo standard text - %ESC%[40mred text%ESC%[39m

    which renders to:

    standard text - red text

    %ESC%[40m defines a red text, whereas %ESC%[39m sets it back to default.

  4. To define both a foreground and a background color, they can be put together in one expression:

    set ESC=echo %ESC%[35;101mViolet text on bright red background%ESC%[39;49m

    Here, foreground and background must be reset afterwards.