The ANSI/VT100 terminals and terminal emulators are not just able to display black and white text ; they can display colors and formatted texts thanks to escape sequences. Those sequences are composed of the Escape character (often represented by “^[” or “<Esc>”) followed by some other characters: “<Esc>[FormatCodem”.

In Bash, the <Esc> character can be obtained with the following syntaxes:

• \e
• \033
• \x1B

Examples:

Code (Bash)	Preview
echo -e "\e[31mHello World\e[0m"
echo -e "\033[31mHello\e[0m World"

NOTE¹: The -e option of the echo command enable the parsing of the escape sequences.

NOTE²: The “\e[0m” sequence removes all attributes (formatting and colors). It can be a good idea to add it at the end of each colored text. ;)

NOTE³: The examples in this page are in Bash but the ANSI/VT100 escape sequences can be used in every programming languages.

Here are the most commonly supported control sequences for formatting text. Their support depends on the used terminal (see the compatibility list).

The following colors works with most terminals and terminals emulators ²⁾, see the compatibility list for more informations.

NOTE: The colors can vary depending of the terminal configuration.

Some terminals (see the compatibility list) can support 88 or 256 colors. Here are the control sequences that permit you to use them.

NOTE¹: The colors number 256 is only supported by vte (GNOME Terminal, XFCE4 Terminal, Nautilus Terminal, Terminator,…).

NOTE²: The 88-colors terminals (like rxvt) does not have the same color map that the 256-colors terminals. For showing the 88-colors terminals color map, run the “256-colors.sh” script in a 88-colors terminal.

For using one of the 256 colors on the foreground (text color), the control sequence is “<Esc>[38;5;ColorNumberm” where ColorNumber is one of the following colors:

Examples:

Code (Bash)	Preview
echo -e "\e[38;5;82mHello \e[38;5;198mWorld"
for i in {16..21} {21..16} ; do echo -en "\e[38;5;${i}m#\e[0m" ; done ; echo

For using one of the 256 colors on the background, the control sequence is “<Esc>[48;5;ColorNumberm” where ColorNumber is one of the following colors:

Examples:

Code (Bash)	Preview
echo -e "\e[40;38;5;82m Hello \e[30;48;5;82m World \e[0m"
for i in {16..21} {21..16} ; do echo -en "\e[48;5;${i}m \e[0m" ; done ; echo

Terminals allow attribute combinations. The attributes must be separated by a semicolon (“;”).

Examples:

Description	Code (Bash)	Preview
Bold + Underlined	echo -e "\e[1;4mBold and Underlined"
Bold + Red forground + Green background	echo -e "\e[1;31;42m Yes it is awful \e[0m"

Notations used in the table:

• “ok”: Supported by the terminal.
• “~”: Supported in a special way by the terminal.
• “-”: Not supported at all by the terminal.

The following shell script displays a lot of possible combination of the attributes (but not all, because it uses only one formatting attribute at a time).

colors_and_formatting.sh

#!/bin/bash
 
# This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
# the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
# and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
# To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
# http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details.
 
#Background
for clbg in {40..47} {100..107} 49 ; do
	#Foreground
	for clfg in {30..37} {90..97} 39 ; do
		#Formatting
		for attr in 0 1 2 4 5 7 ; do
			#Print the result
			echo -en "\e[${attr};${clbg};${clfg}m ^[${attr};${clbg};${clfg}m \e[0m"
		done
		echo #Newline
	done
done
 
exit 0

The following script display the 256 colors available on some terminals and terminals emulators like XTerm and GNOME Terminal.

256-colors.sh

#!/bin/bash
 
# This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
# the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
# and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
# To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
# http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details.
 
for fgbg in 38 48 ; do # Foreground / Background
    for color in {0..255} ; do # Colors
        # Display the color
        printf "\e[${fgbg};5;%sm  %3s  \e[0m" $color $color
        # Display 6 colors per lines
        if [ $((($color + 1) % 6)) == 4 ] ; then
            echo # New line
        fi
    done
    echo # New line
done
 
exit 0

• Linux console codes manual (''man console_codes'')
• XTerm Control Sequences
• Compilation of all escape sequences
• ANSI escape code (Wikipedia)