Fun with ANSI escape codes

For fun I recently pimped out a ruby script that I had written for some testing with a little color and a spinner. If you have never used ANSI escape codes before I've put together a simple script that shows how easy it is.

First let me say that if you are using ruby and all you want to do is add color there is a Term::ANSIColor gem that you can install. It seems a little overkill to have a gem for this but I figured I would mention it.

The following script displays some sample colors:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

printf "\033[0mAll attributes off\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[1mBold\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[4mUnderline\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[5mBlink\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[8mHide\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[30mBlack\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[31mRed\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[32mGreen\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[33mYellow\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[34mBlue\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[35mMagenta\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[36mCyan\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[37mWhite\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[40m\033[37mBlack Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[41mRead Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[42mGreen Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[43mYellow Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[44mBlue Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[45mMagenta Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[46mCyan Background\033[0m\n"
printf "\033[47mWhite Background\033[0m\n"

The only trick to this is that you use an escape code of "\033[" then some code that changes or resets the color. For more information see the Wikipedia link at the end of this post.

And here is how to make a simple spinner:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

sym = ['|', '/', '-', '\\\']
count = 0

printf "\033[s"
10.times do
  printf "\033[u\033[1D"
  printf "\033[34m" + sym[count % sym.length] + "\033[0m"
  printf "\033[s\033[0;0f"
  STDOUT.flush
  sleep 1
  count += 1
end
printf "\033[u"

If you want the full list of the codes you can use and more general information check out the Wikipedia ANSI Escape Code Information.

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