Printing styled text to the terminal

Question

I have a program that I run through the command line and I wanted to print out bold or styled text similar to how the man pages are bold (I can't think of a styled example offhand).

How do I style text sent to the terminal?

If it makes a difference, I'm running a MacOSX terminal.

Answer 1

I believe you want to use the ncurses library to accomplish this.

Answer 2

You can have a look at this SO question: Colored grep? which shows a simple way to color output for VT100 terminals (works great on MacOSX)

Answer 3

Another useful SO Question is: Apply formatting to unix shell, with a link to ANSI escape codes, and examples from a shell.

Answer 4

You can do this from any shell script using the tput program to output terminfo codes. Oddly, there's a code to turn vold on but not off---you have to turn everything off. Reverse video can be turned on and off with tput smso and tput rmso.

Here's an example for bold (/bin/ksh):

print -n "This word is "; tput bold; print -n "bold"; tput sgr0; print "!"

In most programming languages it is easier to fork a process and call tput than it is to bother with the ncurses library (to which tput is a command-line interface).

Answer 5

I have also found this link which was pretty handy.

Info about escape codes and a script to generate escape codes