ANSI Basic 16 Colors - Standard and Bright Color Codes

The 16 Basic ANSI Colors

The original ANSI standard defines 8 base colors and 8 bright (high-intensity) variants. These 16 colors are universally supported across virtually every terminal emulator, making them the safest choice for cross-platform CLI applications.

Standard Colors (0-7)

The first 8 colors use SGR codes 30-37 for foreground and 40-47 for background:

Code	Color	FG	BG
0	Black	30	40
1	Red	31	41
2	Green	32	42
3	Yellow	33	43
4	Blue	34	44
5	Magenta	35	45
6	Cyan	36	46
7	White	37	47

Bright Colors (8-15)

Bright variants use SGR codes 90-97 for foreground and 100-107 for background:

Code	Color	FG	BG
8	Bright Black	90	100
9	Bright Red	91	101
10	Bright Green	92	102
11	Bright Yellow	93	103
12	Bright Blue	94	104
13	Bright Magenta	95	105
14	Bright Cyan	96	106
15	Bright White	97	107

Usage Example (Bash)

# Red text
echo -e "\033[31mThis is red\033[0m"

# Bright green text on blue background
echo -e "\033[92;44mBright green on blue\033[0m"

Important Notes

The actual appearance of these colors depends on the terminal's color scheme. Many terminals allow users to customize the RGB values of the 16 base colors, so "red" might appear differently across terminals. The bright variants were originally rendered by combining the bold attribute with the standard color, but modern terminals treat them as distinct colors.