I was reading about how to change the text color in console programaticly and I was introduced to terminal escape sequences. One thing I read is that it is not portable. How portable is it? I heard ncurses is more portable.

My porpose is to design programs that should be runnable on unix machine ( which works and I'm happy) for the future when I come back to escape sequences and changing color of console I would like to know how portable is it for me to decide how much effort I'll put in to learn ncurses.

Thank you

I would go as far as to say that ANSI/VT100 are solid standards, and would be more portable than the BSD curses (with which I think ncurses is backwards-compatible) standard (if you want to call it a standard). For example, on a stripped-down, lean, headless, embedded computer I would not expect to have (n)curses installed. But if I pull out my Serial Console/VT100 Emulator, I get colors (since the actual bytes are meant to be interpreted by the console and the computer (kernel) itself knows nothing about the colors).

Curses, however, is included with almost any modern unix on which you might possibly find it useful. Curses definitely wins the maintenance and readability contest. It might be easier to use once you get used to it (and might be easier to port when/if you decide that in addition to just colors, you want your program to take key-based input or use console-style dialogs, etc).

google, vt100 escape


google is your friend

it's non-portable but it tends to work ok on all terminals even DOS.
in my experience.

note in linux there is an escape to change the beep length and freq.
quite interesting!

Interesting it works on dos. Does it work on dos (or the dos-like window [cmd]) on windows xp?

actually, i confess, i haven't tried lately!
it is from memory.
(who am i?)

yes, in DOS I remember now.
I used to do it with C programs.

you need to load the ANSI.SYS driver.
I'm talking years ago windows 3.1 when I was young
and used microsoft products

(wipes away a misty tear)