Changing text color in-line?

Short question:

Using bash, is it possible to print a sentence such that each individual word has a different color?

I.e; print a word in-line, change the text color, repeat?

1 Answer

ANSI escape sequences

You can use ANSI escape sequences. It should work in text screens as well as most linux terminal window emulators.

See this link for details,

Example 1: White text on black background

echo -e "\0033[37;40m###############\0033[0m"

Example 2: Black text on greyish white background

echo -e "\0033[30;47m###############\0033[0m"

Example 3: Using the variables inversvid, greenback, blueback and resetvid

inversvid="\0033[7m"
resetvid="\0033[0m"
greenback="\0033[1;37;42m"
blueback="\0033[1;37;44m"
echo -e "$inversvid Now it is inverse colours $resetvid"
echo -e "$greenback Now it is greenback $resetvid and $blueback now blueback $resetvid"

Declare and store variables

Example of basic ANSI colour variables, that I use in bash shellscripts, and that you might find useful,

inversvid="\0033[7m"
resetvid="\0033[0m"
redback="\0033[1;37;41m"
greenback="\0033[1;37;42m"
blueback="\0033[1;37;44m"

Example of advanced ANSI colour variable (that almost matches the mkusb logo colour),

logoansi="\0033[38;5;0;48;5;148m"

The advanced ANSI colours work in most terminal window emulators, but not in text screens, where the colour defaults to 'the nearest basic colour'.

• It is straightforward to declare and store the variables in a bash shellscript (near the beginning, at least before they are used).
• If you want to use them interactively, you can declare and store the variables in the configuration file ~/.bashrc

And of course, you can create [modified] variables to perform what you want.