When developing cross-platform terminal applications or using terminal output for logging or debugging, it's useful to color the output in order to not lose the overview.

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This article shows how to color the terminal output on various platforms.

Linux

Menu File → Open → File. Select the file to be opened. On the open file dialog at the bottom there is a down arrow on the 'Open' button. Click 'Open With.' Click 'Binary Editor'. Or for the keyboard geeks out there: Ctrl + o. Ctrl + v (paste filename). Hexadecimal Similarly, hex is also just a number system with a different base: 16. How do we store more than ten values in a given digit? In other words, the number 10 in hex becomes A, 11 becomes B, 12 becomes C, 13 becomes D, 14 becomes E, and 15 becomes F.

On Linux, you can change the current foreground and background color by writing special character sequences into the output. Write the ESC escape character (octal '033', hex x1b), followed by an opening square bracket [. The color definition will follow next, termniated by a lowercase m.

The color definition is a series of numbers, separated by semicolons. In order to make the text color red (number 31), you can write '033[31m' which will make any following output red. If you want yellow text (33) on blue background (44), you write '033[31;44m'. To reset everything back to the default colors, you write '033[0m'.

The terminal-colors.d manual gives you an overview over the available codes.

Windows

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On Windows, coloring the terminal output, works a bit different. Instead of writing special character sequences into the output, you have to call special functions from the windows library. #include <windows.h> in order to access the Windows functions. This provides the SetConsoleTextAttribute() function that can be used to color the text. You also need to get a handle to the stdout console using GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE).

The following code shows how to color the text red and yellow on blue background:

Unlike Linux, where each foreground and background color has an individual number, you work with the red, green and blue channels on Windows. As you can see with yellow, it's a combination of red and green for example.

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You can check available color values here.