PowerShell not displaying Unix colors

Question

I use various Linux programs on my Windows machine; some of them have colorized output. GnuWin32 and so forth.

However, Windows PowerShell does not support Linux colors; it gets a message like ←[0m31m(which is the color control code), and renders that instead of the color.

Is there any way around this?

Answer 1

Powershell is just a text-mode program, running in the Windows console. The Windows console does not support ANSI escape sequences which is what you are seeing.

To fix it, it depends a lot on which program you are using. I am guessing you use cygwin to run these scripts?

Answer 2

You could use a Linux virtual machine to launch these scripts. This is a big thing for a small result if it's just about showing colors, but it can't hurt to run the scripts on the platform they were made for.

Answer 3

You can use Cygwin to run PowerShell and PowerShell scripts:

Cygwin can handle the escape sequences.

Answer 4

You said you were using Mercurial to run the Linux programs. Assuming you're referring to the source control system (which I didn't realize could run Linux programs; I only use it for source control), there's an extension that will let you show color. Wincolor will intercept the ANSI color control and call the appropriate Windows functions. It seems to work no matter what, but I think it works better with pyreadline installed.

Note: I have treid this without pyreadline, and it didn't work for me. I have not yet tried it with pyreadline.

Answer 5

For posterity

You can use ANSICON to display ANSI escape sequences in Windows consoles, including Powershell. This should give you color.

This issue thread on getting it to work with PowerShell has a few different solutions as there is more than one way to do it.