Crate output_vt100

Output-VT100

When you write terminal-based crates, sometimes you might want to use the standard ANSI escaped characters, to display some colors, to display text as bold, italic or whatever. However, you’ve just discovered all your pretty displays that worked like a charm on Linux and Mac look terrible on Windows, because the escaped characters do not work. Rather, they are not activated by default. Then you discover you have to do system calls to Windows directly to activate them in order to get your beautiful text back. What a pain! And this is where this crate comes in action! Simply add it as a dependency for your own crate, and use it like this:

extern crate output_vt100;

fn main() {
    output_vt100::init();
    println!("\x1b[31mThis text is red!\x1b[0m");
}

And that’s it! By calling it once, you have now activated PowerShell’s and CMD’s support for ANSI’s escaped characters on your Windows builds! And you can leave this line in your Unix builds too, it will simply do nothing.

Functions

init
try_init