terminal - List of ANSI color escape sequences

Question

On most terminals it is possible to colorize output using the 33 ANSI escape sequence.

I'm looking for a list of all supported colors and options (like bright and blinking).

As there are probably differences between the terminals supporting them, I'm mainly interested in sequences supported by xterm-compatible terminals.

Answer 1

The ANSI escape sequences you're looking for are the Select Graphic Rendition subset. All of these have the form

33[XXXm

where XXX is a series of semicolon-separated parameters.

To say, make text red, bold, and underlined (we'll discuss many other options below) in C you might write:

printf("33[31;1;4mHello33[0m");

In C++ you'd use

std::cout<<"33[31;1;4mHello33[0m";

In Python3 you'd use

print("33[31;1;4mHello33[0m")

and in Bash you'd use

echo -e "33[31;1;4mHello33[0m"

where the first part makes the text red (31), bold (1), underlined (4) and the last part clears all this (0).

As described in the table below, there are a large number of text properties you can set, such as boldness, font, underlining, &c. (Isn't it silly that StackOverflow doesn't allow you to put proper tables in answers?)

Font Effects

Code	Effect	Note
0	Reset / Normal	all attributes off
1	Bold or increased intensity
2	Faint (decreased intensity)	Not widely supported.
3	Italic	Not widely supported. Sometimes treated as inverse.
4	Underline
5	Slow Blink	less than 150 per minute
6	Rapid Blink	MS-DOS ANSI.SYS; 150+ per minute; not widely supported
7	[[reverse video]]	swap foreground and background colors
8	Conceal	Not widely supported.
9	Crossed-out	Characters legible, but marked for deletion. Not widely supported.
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	Normal color or intensity	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	Not crossed out
30–37	Set foreground color	See color table below
38	Set foreground color	Next arguments are 5;<n> or 2;<r>;<g>;<b>, see below
39	Default foreground color	implementation defined (according to standard)
40–47	Set background color	See color table below
48	Set background color	Next arguments are 5;<n> or 2;<r>;<g>;<b>, see below
49	Default background color	implementation defined (according to standard)
51	Framed
52	Encircled
53	Overlined
54	Not framed or encircled
55	Not overlined
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
90–97	Set bright foreground color	aixterm (not in standard)
100–107	Set bright background color	aixterm (not in standard)