How to display colour text in terminal?

Question

I want to display colour text in terminal(bash shell). Tried with this approach:

echo -e "\e[1;31m This is red text \e[0m"

But it doesn't change the text colour to red.

Solution

You may try with this command:

echo -e "\033[1;31m This is red text"

31 is the "color" and 1 is the "style".

You can play with different color:

for i in {30..37}; do echo -e "\033[1;$i""m colorful text\033[0m"; done

And different styles:

for i in {1..7}; do echo -e "\033[$i;31""m different style\033[0m"; done

Notice:

The "\033[0m" at the end of the string is like a closing tag, so that it won't affect the text after.

Comments

[Fanatique]

What is the terminal you're using it in? It might be that your terminal doesn't support colors. That command outputs red text to me

[Arin]

@Fanatique Default terminal of mac. Doesn't it support text colouring?

[Arin]

You are talking about changing the terminal colour/style. But the requirement is to display coloured text using shell-script.

[Arin]

In my system Display ANSI colors is already enabled. However, Text colour doesn't change after export CLICOLOR=1 to .bash_profile. The reference that you have shared talks about changing the colour of PS1 which is working as expected. @Fanatique

[Arin]

Thanks, @Yoric. This approach perfectly works for me.

[JdeBP]

This answer does not really make clear the cause of the problem, which is explained at unix.stackexchange.com/a/461073/5132 and is everything to do with the quirks of the echo command.