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I want to cut and paste from cmd and keep the color information when pasting to another application. It's similar to pasting in most applications with formatting information.

Is there a way to do this? Or can it be done with an app similar to cmd?

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3 Answers

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The PowerShell folks, on their blog, posted an article titled: Colorized capture of console screen in HTML and RTF

Once it's in a RTF file, with colors, open the RTF with Word or OpenOffice and copy the text to your target application.

As PowerShell is a nice replacement of cmd.exe with a lot more features, give it a try.

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It's not so much a replacement as an alternative. Compatibility dictates that it can't replace cmd :-) – Joey Dec 2 '09 at 14:54
Yes, you're right, Johannes! "Danke schön" for the clarification :-) . – Snark Dec 2 '09 at 15:00
+Awesome! Thanks. It was a bit confusing at first since I had never used PowerShell, but it worked exactly as described. – Keith Bentrup Dec 3 '09 at 11:08
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Colours in cmd are not the same as normal colours, it's the interpreter interpreting colour codes. I do not believe it's possible to do, and checking in Console2, it can't do it either, so it's probably for a very good reason.

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AFAIK, Windows Console doesn't support ANSI colour codes (as Unix terminal emulators do); the program must call special functions to set the text colour. Also, a program can read the complete contents of its screen buffer (that's how that PowerShell snippet works) -- and it would be possible to make Console2 remember everything too. There's no real reason preventing it. – grawity Dec 2 '09 at 13:53
Well, I'm often wrong ;) I assumed the two would work similarly, as cygwin's tools have working colour, but they must have implemented that themselves. – Phoshi Dec 2 '09 at 16:16
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There is a long winded way of doing it, using screen capture?

  1. Hit Alt+PrtScr
  2. This will copy the window to the clipboard
  3. From Start, enter mspaint
  4. Click on Edit/Paste or Ctrl-V to paste the contents of clipboard
  5. Edit it to only show the command box and save it to PNG (GIF will lead to Paint dithering the classic grey text, and JPEG would create artefacts around your text).

Then those screen capture shots, will be ready to be inserted into Word as an image for documenting purposes. Of course, it's not text, so it won't be selectable. But it may be better than nothing.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

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