How can I make the watch command interpret vt100 sequences?

Question

Consider this simple example (which displays in red):

echo -e \"\\033[31mHello World\\033[0m\"

It displays on the terminal correctly in red. No

Answer 1

You can try single quoting your command :

watch 'echo -e "\tHello World"'

On my machine this leaves me with a -e as first character, and a correctly tabbed hello world. It seems -e is the default for my version of echo. Still, it is a progress toward a correctly tabbed hello world

What happens is a double unquoting :
what watch see

echo -e "\033[31mHello World\033[0m"

what the shell called by watch see :

echo -e \033[31mHello World\033[0m

And then the backslash come into play, even when quoted, and it becomes a quoting nightmare.