How can I change the text color in the windows command prompt

Question

I have a command line program, which outputs logging to the screen.

I want error lines to show up in red. Is there some special character codes I can output to switc

Answer 1

You can read here a good and illustrated article: http://kpumuk.info/ruby-on-rails/colorizing-console-ruby-script-output/

I think setting console text color is pretty language-specific. Here is an example in C# from MSDN:

for (int x = 0; x < colorNames.Length; x++)
{
  Console.Write("{0,2}: ", x);
  Console.BackgroundColor = ConsoleColor.Black;
  Console.ForegroundColor = (ConsoleColor)Enum.Parse(typeof(ConsoleColor), colorNames[x]);
  Console.Write("This is foreground color {0}.", colorNames[x]);
  Console.ResetColor();
  Console.WriteLine();
}

Console.ForegroundColor is the property for setting text color.

Answer 2

Ultimately you need to call SetConsoleTextAttribute. You can get a console screen buffer handle from GetStdHandle.

Answer 3

On windows, you can do it easily in three ways:

require 'win32console'
puts "\e[31mHello, World!\e[0m"

Now you could extend String with a small method called red

 require 'win32console'
 class String
   def red
     "\e[31m#{self}\e[0m"
   end
 end

 puts "Hello, World!".red

Also you can extend String like this to get more colors:

require 'win32console'

class String
  { :reset          =>  0,
    :bold           =>  1,
    :dark           =>  2,
    :underline      =>  4,
    :blink          =>  5,
    :negative       =>  7,
    :black          => 30,
    :red            => 31,
    :green          => 32,
    :yellow         => 33,
    :blue           => 34,
    :magenta        => 35,
    :cyan           => 36,
    :white          => 37,
  }.each do |key, value|
    define_method key do
      "\e[#{value}m" + self + "\e[0m"
    end
  end
end

puts "Hello, World!".red

Or, if you can install gems:

gem install term-ansicolor

And in your program:

require 'win32console'
require 'term/ansicolor'

class String
  include Term::ANSIColor
end

puts "Hello, World!".red
puts "Hello, World!".blue
puts "Annoy me!".blink.yellow.bold

Please see the docs for term/ansicolor for more information and possible usage.

Answer 4

on ANSI escape codes:

32-bit character-mode (subsystem:console) Windows applications don't write ANSI escape sequences to the console

They must interpret the escape code actions and call the native Console API instead

Thanks microsoft :-(

Answer 5

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace Console_Test
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkRed;
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

You can change the color using a simple C# program, http://powerof2games.com/node/31 describes how you can wrap console output to achieve the effect.

Answer 6

color [background][foreground]

Where colors are defined as follows:

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

For example, to change the background to blue and the foreground to gray, you would type:

color 18