ANSI Color Code Generator

How to use

1. 1Type the text you want to colorize into the Sample text field. The live preview at the bottom of the card updates as you type.
2. 2Pick a foreground color: choose Default to leave the terminal default, 16 colors for the most portable palette, 256 palette for any xterm index, or RGB / Truecolor for any 24-bit color.
3. 3Optionally pick a background color the same way, then toggle any text styles you want (bold, italic, underline, blink, reverse, strikethrough).
4. 4Read the live preview and the SGR parameters card to confirm the sequence is right.
5. 5Copy a snippet that matches your environment: bash echo, bash printf, Python, Node.js, PowerShell, or the raw escape sequence. Every snippet ends with ESC[0m so the next line resets cleanly.
6. 6Switch to Decoder mode to paste an existing ANSI string and see every segment and parameter explained in plain English.

About this tool

ANSI Color Code Generator builds and decodes the ESC[ ... m escape sequences that color terminal output across bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell, Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, and any other language that writes to a TTY. Pick a foreground color and a background color from three palettes: the widely supported 16 named colors (SGR 30 to 37 and 40 to 47, plus the bright variants 90 to 97 and 100 to 107), the xterm 256-color palette (38;5;N and 48;5;N with the standard 0..15 names, the 6x6x6 RGB cube at 16..231, and the 24-step grayscale ramp at 232..255), or 24-bit truecolor (38;2;R;G;B and 48;2;R;G;B) for any RGB value. Stack on text styles using the standard SGR parameters: bold (1), dim (2), italic (3), underline (4), blink (5), reverse (7), and strikethrough (9). The live preview renders the result with the same color and style attributes a typical terminal would apply, including the reverse-video swap and the dim opacity, so you can see what the output will look like before pasting it into your script. The output panel emits ready-to-paste snippets in every common shape: the raw escape sequence (real ESC bytes for use in files or pipes), string literals using either the \x1b hex form or the \033 octal form, a bash echo -e command, a portable bash printf '%b' command (works in dash, busybox, and zsh), a Python print() call, a Node.js console.log() call, a PowerShell Write-Host using $([char]27) so it works in Windows PowerShell 5.1 as well as PowerShell 7, and a C / C++ string literal you can pass to printf or fputs. Every snippet ends with the explicit reset sequence ESC[0m so styling does not bleed into the next line of output. The Decoder mode takes any ANSI string you paste (real ESC bytes, the \x1b escape, the \033 octal form, the \e form, the \u001b form, or the literal ESC[ prefix) and breaks it into segments, explains every SGR parameter in plain English, names the foreground and background colors, expands 38;5;N and 38;2;R;G;B into their human description, and surfaces any non-SGR CSI sequences (cursor movement, clear screen, save / restore) that were ignored. Useful for adding colored output to a CLI tool, generating banners for a build script, writing readable log levels in a deploy pipeline, decoding the byte stream a Docker container is producing, learning what every parameter in an escape sequence actually means, or building a quick reference for the SGR codes when reading source from a tool like ls, grep, or git. Composition, decoding, and snippet generation all run locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.