12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

Chris Yeh

Terminal Colors
Posted: Mar 28, 2020.
Tags: unix

In this post, I explore how terminals display color, a two-stage process involving ANSI escape
codes and user-defined color schemes.

Contents
Overview
ASCII Escape Character
ANSI Escape Codes for Terminal Graphics
Color Schemes
Windows Colors
My Preferred Color Scheme

Overview
Terminals traditionally take an input of bytes and display them as white text on a black
background. If the input contains specific “control characters,” then the terminal may alter
certain display properties of the text, such as the color or font. Old terminals could only display
a maximum of 8 colors. However, modern computer screens are capable of displaying 24-bit
RGB color, so modern terminals have to implement a mapping of the 8 original colors to RGB
values. This mapping can usually be changed according to user-defined color schemes.

ASCII Escape Character

The ANSI ASCII standard represents the escape ESC character by the decimal number 27 (33 in
octal, 1B in hexadecimal). This is one of the control characters (0-31 and 127), not one of the
printable characters (32-126).

ASCII code 27 is indeed the character corresponding to the Escape key on a keyboard. However,
most shells recognize the Escape key as a control character (usually for a keyboard shortcut)
and therefore do not translate the Escape key into any text representation. Thus, each
programming language has its own method of representing the escape character within a
string:

  Bash C Python 3

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 1/6
12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

  Bash C Python 3

\e (non- Python 3.3+ only: \N{ESCAPE} ,

literal \e , \E
standard) \N{escape} , \N{ESC} , \N{esc}

octal \033 \33 , \033 \33 , \033

hexadecimal \x1b \x1b \x1b

\u1b ,
Unicode – \u001b , \U0000001b
\U1b

Additional notes

For all 3 languages, any place where 1b appears, the capitalized hexadecimal 1B also
works.
Bash supports Unicode characters of the form \uXXXX ( \u + 4 hexadecimal digits) and
\UXXXXXXXX ( \U + 8 hexadecimal digits), but unlike Python, it allows for leading zeros to
be omitted.
Most major C compilers, including gcc and clang, support the non-standard \e syntax for
the escape character.
While C generally supports unicode characters of the form \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX , it
oddly does not support Unicode control characters. From the C18 specification on universal
character names:
A universal character name shall not specify a character whose short identifier is less
than 00A0 other than 0024 ($), 0040 (@), or 0060 (‘)

ANSI Escape Codes for Terminal Graphics

The ANSI escape code standard, formally adopted as ISO/IEC 6429, defines a series of control
sequences. Each control sequence begins with a Control Sequence Inducer (CSI), defined as an
escape character followed immediately by a bracket: ESC[ . In particular, a CSI followed by a
certain number of “parameter bytes” (ASCII 0–9:;<=>? ) then the letter m forms a control
sequence known as a Select Graphic Rendition (SGR). If no parameter bytes are explicitly
given, then it is assumed to be 0 . SGR parameters can be chained together with a semicolon ;
as the delimiter.

Some common SGR parameters are shown below:

Parameter Effect

0 reset all SGR effects to their default

1 bold or increased intensity

2 faint or decreased intensity

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 2/6
12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

Parameter Effect

4 singly underlined

5 slow blink

30-37 foreground color (8 colors)

38;5;x foreground color (256 colors, non-standard)

38;2;r;g;b foreground color (RGB, non-standard)

40-47 background color (8 colors)

48;5;x background color (256 colors, non-standard)

48;2;r;g;b background color (RGB, non-standard)

90-97 bright foreground color (non-standard)

100-107 bright background color (non-standard)

The 8 actual colors within the ranges (30-37, 40-47, 90-97, 100-107) are defined by the ANSI
standard as follows:

Last Digit Color

0 black

1 red

2 green

3 yellow

4 blue

5 magenta

6 cyan

7 white

We put these pieces together to create a SGR command. Thus, ESC[1m specifies bold (or
bright) text, and ESC[31m specifies red foreground text. We can chain together parameters; for
example, ESC[32;47m specifies green foreground text on a white background.

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 3/6
12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

The following diagram shows a complete example for rendering the word “text” in red with a
single underline.

CSI Final Byte

\x1b[31;4mtext
ESC character Parameters
in Hex ASCII

Notes

For terminals that support bright foreground colors, ESC[1;3Xm is usually equivalent to
ESC[9Xm (where X is a digit in 0-7). However, the reverse does not seem to hold, at least
anecdotally: ESC[2;9Xm usually does not render the same as ESC[3Xm .
Not all terminals support every effect.
Documentation is available for Microsoft Windows Console and Linux.
Microsoft and the Linux manual pages both refer to SGR as “Set Graphics Rendition,”
instead of “Select Graphic Rendition.”

Examples

Bash: printf "\u1b[31mtest\033[ming\n"

C: printf("%s\n", "\x1b[31mtest\033[0ming");
Python: print('\N{ESC}[31mtest\u001b[0ming')
Output: testing

Additional Sources

Colors In Terminal: describes control sequences at a high level and covers 256-color support
ANSI Escape sequences: easy-to-read chart of control sequences

Color Schemes
The role of terminal color schemes is to map the 8 colors to RGB values. Most terminals support
an additional 8 colors corresponding to the bold or bright variants of the original colors. The
GitHub repo mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes provides a sampling of common color schemes.

Windows Colors
While the 8 standard color names are widely used within ANSI and ISO standards documents as
well as the Linux community, Microsoft uses slightly different names and ordering of colors.

Windows Console (Command Prompt)

The command color sets the default console foreground and background colors, and it can
also be used to list out the supported colors with color /? . The colors are named as follows:

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 4/6
12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

0 = Black 8 = Gray

1 = Blue 9 = Light Blue

2 = Green A = Light Green

3 = Aqua B = Light Aqua

4 = Red C = Light Red

5 = Purple D = Light Purple

6 = Yellow E = Light Yellow

7 = White F = Bright White

Notably, Microsoft renames “cyan” to “aqua” and “magenta” to “purple,” and it names the
bold/bright variant of black as “gray.” This ordering is also the ordering of colors that appear in
the Windows Console settings.

Windows Terminal (beta)

Windows Terminal now uses the ANSI color names except that it still uses “purple” instead of
“magenta.” However, there is an open issue (as of March 28, 2020) where Microsoft seems to be
considering “magenta.”

My Preferred Color Scheme

Personally, here is the color scheme that I’ve found to work well for me. It is largely based on
Ubuntu’s default terminal color scheme (changes are marked by an asterisk *).

Color RGB Hexadecimal

■ black* 0, 0, 0 000000

■ red 204, 0, 0 cc0000

■ green 78, 154, 6 4e9a06

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 5/6
12/9/2021 Terminal Colors | Chris Yeh

Color RGB Hexadecimal

■ yellow 196, 160, 0 c4a000

■ blue* 114, 159, 207 729fcf

■ magenta 117, 80, 123 75507b

■ cyan 6, 152, 154 06989a

■ white 211, 215, 207 d3d7cf

■ bright black 85, 87, 83 555753

■ bright red 239, 41, 41 ef2929

■ bright green 138, 226, 52 8ae234

■ bright yellow 252, 233, 79 fce94f

■ bright blue* 50, 175, 255 32afff

■ bright magenta 173, 127, 168 ad7fa8

■ bright cyan 52, 226, 226 34e2e2

■ bright white* 255, 255, 255 ffffff

This page was generated by GitHub Pages.

© Christopher Yeh, 2021

https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2020/03/28/terminal-colors.html 6/6