How to change font colors in terminal?

Question

I know how to change the font color via preferences, but it changes the color of ALL text, as in below:

what I have

What I'm going for is something more like this:

what I want

Any tips?

Oh, sorry. Nothing really, but I was just thinking you might be Peter Venkman. But if you were you would have immediately responded... Ghostbusters... Still, I checked out the sidebar about related questions and I found a pretty awesome answer to something like this that included a bunch of other awesome links. Specifically you'll need to use terminal escapes - or possibly tput - in your $PS1 variable - or maybe in $PROMPT_COMMAND. Play around with it. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/43075/how-to-change-the-contents-of-a-line-on-the-terminal-as-opposed-to-writing-a-new?rq=1 — mikeserv, Jun 08 '14 at 07:41

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 08 '14 at 08:45

A lot of unix terminals can recognise some (but usually not all) Ansi Escape codes

So you can use those (the ones that work for your terminal) to change the display as needed.

A very simple example (I use printf as it's portable across many different (and old!) shells) :

export _norm_="$(printf '\033[0m')" #reset "everything" to normal
export _bold_="$(printf '\033[1m')"   #set bold
export _rred_="$(printf '\033[0;1;5;31m')" #"reverse red"
echo "This is an ${_rred_}ERROR${_norm_} and this is ${_bold_}A WARNING${_norm_}"

Please not that those may vary depending on the terminal type (TERM=...), and the program you connect to that machine with (most notably: reverse can become "blink" when using some windows terminal such as F-secure instead of Putty, for example..)

In other words: this is not completely portable, and depends on many things. But "bold" is quite always working. "reverse" is more prone to be terminal dependant.

tput is also better to use as it's taking care to find out the proper sequence for your terminal, but it's not always available (not on old machines, for example)

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 23 '14 at 01:02

1

As Olivier Dulac said, you need ANSI escape codes, please refer to Bash tips: Colors and formatting

for details.

answered Jun 23 '14 at 01:02

where23

141

score -1 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 26 '17 at 13:53

-1

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

edited Apr 26 '17 at 13:53

Jeff Schaller

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answered Apr 26 '17 at 13:21

linux

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This maybe a start to answering the question. But as of now ... Can you please edit this to edit it into an answer? – Stephen Rauch Apr 26 '17 at 13:38

How to change font colors in terminal?

3 Answers3