I have a program in C where I want to draw colors and move cursors, etc. in the terminal. Currently, I am just using ANSI escape codes to do this. Is ANSI the most modern and most popular/used standard? Is it portable? Will more or fewer terminals support ANSI in the future?

CodePudding user response：

Modern terminal emulators (just about anything normal people will encounter these days) all tend to use stuff you can find documented in two places:

Microsoft’s “Console Virtual Terminal Sequences”

Thomas Dickey’s “XTerm Control Sequences”

It doesn’t get more authoritative than that.

CodePudding user response：

I'd say that ANSI is going to be pretty reliably portable for some time to come.

However, it's possibly more productive and more protected from changes in underlying standards (e.g. a resurgence of PC3270) to use a library. There's an enormous list of them here, under the Libraries section. Ncurses seems to be something of a staple, and notcurses has a lot of merit too.