Changing text color in-line?

Question

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?

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,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

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.

Comments

[Redbob]

Do you mean customize colors at terminal? What is your ubuntu release? This can be useful to you

[Graviton]

@Redbob I'm currently using Ubuntu 14.04. And no. I want to print a sentence from a bash program that has a custom coloring without interfering with the rest of the text/profile.

[Redbob]

How about this?

[Graviton]

@Redbob Exactly what I was looking for!

[Redbob]

Tks! I encourage you to develop this solution and post results as your answer. It will be useful and "maybe" more practical then the solution we indicated.

[ob2]

Probably duplicate and already answered here stackoverflow.com/questions/5947742/…

[Panther]

If you are going to use colors often, define them in .bashrc or I call .envrc as I use the same variables with zsh - bodhizazen.com/Tutorials/envrc . If you are wanting a portable script, often easiest to define colors at the top of the script .