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.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '09 at 22:05

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

answered Feb 07 '09 at 22:05

Dave Markle

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

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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)

edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

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answered Feb 07 '09 at 22:09

epatel

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score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

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

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

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answered Feb 07 '09 at 22:19

mouviciel

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 07 '09 at 22:32

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).

Printing styled text to the terminal

4 Answers4