Print all 256 colors for testing TERM or for a quick reference

for i in {0..256}; do echo -e "${i} \033[38;05;${i}m COLOR \033[0m"; done

Basically, \033[ is a semi-portable unix escape character. It should work in linux, osx, bsd, etc. The first option is 38. This tells whatever is interpreting this (and this is merely convention) that a special color sequence follows. The next option is 5 which says that the next option will specify a color ? {0..256} of course. These options, as you can see, are separated by a single `;` and the entire escape sequence is followed by a mandatory `m`. The second escape sequence (following "COLOR") is simply to clear all terminal attributes (for our purposes, it clears color). This for loop is helpful for testing all 256 colors in a 256 console (note: this will not work in a standard Linux tty console) or to see which number corresponds to which color so that perhaps you can use it!

Sample Output

1 COLOR
2 COLOR
...
255 COLOR
256 COLOR

By: Benharper

2015-12-17 23:49:42

echo bash color terminal output for ncurses tput askapache colors printf COLUMNS tset 256 subshell

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Print all 256 colors for testing TERM or for a quick reference

This is super fast and an easy way to test your terminal for 256 color support. Unlike alot of info about changing colors in the terminal, this uses the ncurses termcap/terminfo database to determine the escape codes used to generate the colors for a specific TERM. That means you can switch your terminal and then run this to check the real output. tset xterm-256color at any rate that is some super lean code! Here it is in function form to stick in your .bash_profile aa_256 () { ( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`; for i in {0..256}; do o=00$i; echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x; done ) } From my bash_profile: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`;for i in {0..256};do o=00$i;echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x;done; )

AskApache · 2010-09-06 10:39:27 9

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What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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