SGR 30–37 — Foreground color (8 basic)

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Description

The 8 basic foreground colors map one-to-one to SGR parameters 30 black, 31 red, 32 green, 33 yellow, 34 blue, 35 magenta, 36 cyan, 37 white. SGR 39 returns the foreground to the terminal default without touching the background — the surgical complement to a full \x1b[0m reset. ECMA-48 §8.3.117 specifies the parameter range; every terminal in the support matrix above honors the full 30–37 + 39 surface, including the Linux console (in 8-colour mode) and conhost.exe / ConPTY. The actual rendered RGB is theme-dependent — there is no canonical 'ANSI red'. xterm's default theme paints 31 as #cd0000; macOS Terminal.app's default is #c33720; Solarized's red is #dc322f; the user's xresources / profile config can remap any of the 16 slots arbitrarily. Apps that need a specific shade must use 256-color or truecolor, not basic 31.

The portability traps are environmental, not parser-side. On the Linux console / fbcon the basic 8 fg + 16 bg slots are the only colours that render — \x1b[38;5;Nm (256-color) and \x1b[38;2;R;G;Bm (truecolor) silently quantize to the nearest of those 16. Linux console also implements bold-as-bright (\x1b[1;31m paints in bright red, not weight-31-red), so on that terminal SGR 90–97 is fully redundant with 1;3N. Two cross-environment pitfalls bite often: (1) emitting raw \x1b[31m from a shell script without checking isatty(stdout) leaks ^[[31m bytes when the user pipes to less (without -R) or to a file — use tput setaf 1 for portable scripts so terminfo consults $TERM and returns empty on dumb / non-TTY; (2) emit \x1b[0m (or at least \x1b[39m) before every newline and before exit, or color bleeds into the user's prompt. Always honour the de-facto NO_COLOR=1 env var when output is going to a terminal you don't control.

Disable foreground with \x1b[39m — surgical, leaves background and other attributes intact. Don't reach for \x1b[0m just to close a coloured span: that clobbers any bold / italic / bg you also set. For accessibility, pair colour with a textual prefix (✓ ok / ✗ failed) so color-blind users get the same signal — colour should reinforce a message, never carry it alone. For truecolor RGB control without theme dependency, see sgr-fg-truecolor; for the 256-colour palette indices that survive most multiplexers, see sgr-fg-256; for the matching background side, see sgr-bg-basic.

Spec citation: ECMA-48 §8.3.117 (SGR parameters 30–37, 39)

Parameters

Examples

for c in 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37; do printf "\033[${c}m■\033[0m"; done; echo

for c in range(30, 38): print(f'\x1b[{c}m{c}\x1b[0m', end=' ')

for c := 30; c <= 37; c++ { fmt.Printf("\x1b[%dm%d\x1b[0m ", c, c) }

for (let c = 30; c <= 37; c++) process.stdout.write(`\x1b[${c}m${c}\x1b[0m `)

for (int c = 30; c <= 37; c++) printf("\x1b[%dm%d\x1b[0m ", c, c);

Terminal support

xterm

yes

Linux console (fbcon)

yes

macOS Terminal.app

yes

iTerm2

yes

Windows Terminal

yes

cmd.exe / ConPTY

yes

kitty

yes

alacritty

yes

WezTerm

yes

Ghostty

yes

GNOME Terminal

yes

Konsole

yes

tmux

yes

GNU screen

yes

Related sequences

• SGR 40–47 — Background color (8 basic)
• SGR 90–97 — Bright foreground color
• SGR 38;5;n — 256-color foreground
• SGR 38;2;R;G;B — 24-bit truecolor foreground

In the family cookbook

↗SGR cookbook · 2. 16-color basic — `\x1b[31m` and friends