Makes ANSI escape character sequences for producing colored terminal
text and cursor positioning work under MS Windows.
ANSI escape character sequences have long been used to produce colored
terminal text and cursor positioning on Unix and Macs. Colorama makes this
work on Windows, too, by wrapping stdout, stripping ANSI sequences it finds
(which otherwise show up as gobbledygook in your output), and converting
them into the appropriate win32 calls to modify the state of the terminal.
On other platforms, Colorama does nothing.
Colorama also provides some shortcuts to help generate ANSI sequences but
works fine in conjunction with any other ANSI sequence generation library,
such as Termcolor (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor.)
This has the upshot of providing a simple cross-platform API for printing
colored terminal text from Python, and has the happy side-effect that
existing applications or libraries which use ANSI sequences to produce
colored output on Linux or Macs can now also work on Windows, simply by
An alternative approach is to install 'ansi.sys' on Windows machines,
which provides the same behaviour for all applications running in
terminals. Colorama is intended for situations where that isn't easy
(e.g. maybe your app doesn't have an installer.)
Demo scripts in the source code repository prints some colored text
using ANSI sequences. Compare their output under Gnome-terminal's
built in ANSI handling, versus on Windows Command-Prompt using
Maintained by: Dimitris Zlatanidis
(the SlackBuild does not include the source)