Python: How to Make the Ansi Escape Codes to Work Also in Windows

Python: How can I make the ANSI escape codes to work also in Windows?

For windows, calling os.system("") makes the ANSI escape sequence get processed correctly:

import os
os.system("")  # enables ansi escape characters in terminal

COLOR = {
    "HEADER": "\033[95m",
    "BLUE": "\033[94m",
    "GREEN": "\033[92m",
    "RED": "\033[91m",
    "ENDC": "\033[0m",
}

print(COLOR["GREEN"], "Testing Green!!", COLOR["ENDC"])

Why do ANSI escape codes sometimes work in CMD

What you're searching for is ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING. The reason it sometimes "stops working", is because some applications disable it before exiting. If it was already enabled, then this is when stuff breaks.

However, you can easily enable it (again) by calling SetConsoleMode() using the winapi crate. You can also use the winapi-util crate which makes it a bit easier.

#[cfg(windows)]
pub fn enable_virtual_terminal_processing() {
    use winapi_util::console::Console;

    if let Ok(mut term) = Console::stdout() {
        let _ = term.set_virtual_terminal_processing(true);
    }
    if let Ok(mut term) = Console::stderr() {
        let _ = term.set_virtual_terminal_processing(true);
    }
}

[target.'cfg(windows)'.dependencies]
winapi-util = "0.1"

To be safe you could call enable_virtual_terminal_processing() initially in main(). However, I definitely recommend calling it after executing a std::process::Command, e.g.:

let output = Command::new("...")
    .args(&["..."])
    .output()
    .expect("failed to execute process");

#[cfg(windows)]
enable_virtual_terminal_processing();

How to use the new support for ANSI escape sequences in the Windows 10 console?

The problem is that the Python interpreter doesn't enable the processing of ANSI escape sequences. The ANSI sequences work from the Windows command prompt because cmd does enable them. If you start Python from the command prompt you'll find the ANSI sequences do work, including the ones for enabling and disabling the cursor. That's because cmd has already enabled them for that console window.

If you want have something you can click on to start the Python interpreter with ANSI escapes enabled you can create a shortcut that runs a command something like cmd /c C:\PythonXY\python.

Another, harder, solution would be to use ctypes to enable ANSI escape sequence processing for the console window by calling the SetConsoleMode Windows API with the ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING flag set. For example:

import ctypes

kernel32 = ctypes.windll.kernel32
kernel32.SetConsoleMode(kernel32.GetStdHandle(-11), 7)

Python module to enable ANSI colors for stdout on Windows?

There are two python modules that are able to do this colorama and tendo.ansiterm module, which was originally written for waf.

By initial tests indicate that colorama is more mature, even if it requires two lines of code instead of one.

import sys
try:
   import colorama
   colorama.init()
except:
   try:
       import tendo.ansiterm
   except:
       pass

sys.stdout.write"\033[33mYellow Submarine"
sys.stderr.write"\033[31mred, red , wine!"

Now, both will work normally but if you try to redirect only one of the stderr or stdout, ansiterm will output ANSI codes to screen and redirected output.

I'm not sure but I suspect that the correct behavior is to strip ANSI codes when the output si not a tty, you don't want to see ANSI escapes in log files.

ANSI escape codes not working on IDLE... (python)

The IDLE shell is not a terminal emulator and not intended to be production environment. The decision so far is that is should show program developers what their program's output, without interpretation. This may change in the future but no final decision yet.

If you are on Windows, I believe its console can be put into ANSI mode, but Python does not do that for you. I don't know if program code can do so.

As near as I can tell, there is not wrapper program that turns mintty into an importable python module. It would not make much sense. Rather, you would want to open mintty or a mintty-based terminal-emulator, such as git bash, and open python within that terminal instead of CommandPrompt.

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