ANSI Colors

ANSI colors are used by CLI programs to color anything printed on the terminal.
With them it's possible to change the font effect and (background) color of a text.

PS: If you are using C# you may not need this.

Getting Started

\\033\[[\d;]+m

To print colored text we need to print an ANSI code before text (it's not displayed).
Each ANSI code has its own effect.

The base form is \033[m.
We put the codes we want between the [ and the m separated by ;.

The \033 is an escape sequence, that represents ESC.
In most programming languages the ESC escape sequence is \033, \e or \x1b.

We can also repeat code as much as we want, but never separate sequences that need to be together.

Font Effects

Some terminals don't support some font effects.
Make sure yours does.

Code	Effect	Note
0	Reset presets	All attributes off
1	Bold
2	Light	Not widely supported
3	Italic	Not widely supported; Sometimes treated as inverse
4	Underline
5	Blink	Less than 150 per minute
6	Rapid blink	Not widely supported; MS-DOS ANSI.SYS; 150+ per minute
7	Invert colors	Swap foreground and background colors
8	Conceal	Not widely supported
9	Line-through	Not widely supported; Characters legible, but marked for deletion
10	Primary(default) font
11–19	Alternate font	Select alternate font n-10
20	Fraktur	Hardly ever supported
21	Bold off or Double Underline	Bold off not widely supported; double underline hardly ever supported
22	Bold or light off	Neither bold nor faint
23	Not italic, not Fraktur
24	Underline off	Not singly or doubly underlined
25	Blink off
27	Inverse off
28	Reveal	conceal off
29	Line-through off
51	Framed
52	Encircled
53	Overlined
54	Not framed or encircled
58	Set effet color	Next arguments are 5;<n> or 2;<r>;<g>;<b>, see below
55	Overlined off
60	ideogram underline	Hardly ever supported
61	ideogram double underline	Hardly ever supported
62	ideogram overline	Hardly ever supported
63	ideogram double overline	Hardly ever supported
64	ideogram stress marking	Hardly ever supported
65	ideogram attributes off	Reset the effects of all of 60-64

2-bit colors

We use 30-39 for foreground color,
and 40-49 for background color.

0 Black
1 Red
2 Green
3 Brown
4 Blue
5 Purple
6 Cyan
7 White
9 Default color

You might be wondering why 8 is not here, it is reserved for higher level colors.

These colors are not static since they can be changed by the user in the terminal's settings.

4-bit colors

Bright colors

Now, we may use 90-97 for a brighter foreground color,
and the 100-107 for a brighter background.

8-bit colors

More possibilities (256)

Now, we can choose a color and use it with the pattern \e[38;5;<color>m for foreground, and \e[48;5;<color>m for background.

RGB

All the colors

To use a RGB color we have the pattern \e[38;2;<r>;<g>;<b>m for foreground, and \e[48;2;<r>;<g>;<b>m for background.

Examples

"Failing and making stupid questions are the best way to learn."

• \e[1;38;2;124;58;237m
  • 1 - Bold
  • 38;2; < 124;58;237 > - RGB purple text color
• \033[1;4;31m
  • 1 - Bold
  • 4 - Underline
  • 31 - Red text color
• \x1b[1;31mSNES Manager \x1b[23mthe best
  • 1 - Bold
  • 31 - Red text color
  • 23 - Bold off

---

I already had all this info but this answer in the StackOverFlow (recommended) helped me to take it out of my head and taught new stuff.
Credits also for Richard (the answer's owner).

© 2023 Panda Soli