I'm building a lightweight version of the ncurses library. So far, it works pretty well with VT100-compatible terminals, but win32 console fails to recognise the \033 code as the beginning of an escape sequence:
# include <stdio.h>
# include "term.h"
int main(void) {
puts(BOLD COLOR(FG, RED) "Bold text" NOT_BOLD " is cool!" CLEAR);
return 0;
}
What needs to be done on the C code level, in order that the ANSI.SYS driver is loaded and the ANSI/VT100 escape sequences recognized?
[UPDATE] For latest Windows 10 please read useful contribution by #brainslugs83, just below in the comments to this answer.
While for versions before Windows 10 Anniversary Update:
ANSI.SYS has a restriction that it can run only in the context of the MS-DOS sub-system under Windows 95-Vista.
Microsoft KB101875 explains how to enable ANSI.SYS in a command window, but it does not apply to Windows NT. According to the article: we all love colors, modern versions of Windows do not have this nice ANSI support.
Instead, Microsoft created a lot of functions, but this is far from your need to operate ANSI/VT100 escape sequence.
For a more detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article:
ANSI.SYS also works in NT-derived systems for 16-bit legacy programs executing under the NTVDM.
The Win32 console does not natively support ANSI escape sequences at all. Software such as Ansicon can however act as a wrapper around the standard Win32 console and add support for ANSI escape sequences.
So I think ANSICON by Jason Hood is your solution. It is written in C, supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, and the source is available.
Also I found some other similar question or post which ultimately have been answered to use ANSICON:
How to load ANSI escape codes or get coloured file listing in WinXP cmd shell?
how to use ansi.sys in windows 7
How can I get cmd.exe to display ANSI color escape sequences?
ansi color in windows shells
enable ansi colors in windows command prompt
Starting from Windows 10 TH2 (v1511), conhost.exe and cmd.exe support ANSI and VT100 Escape Sequences out of the box (although they have to be enabled).
See my answer over at superuser for more details.
Base on #BrainSlugs83 you can activate on the current Windows 10 version via register, with this command line:
REG ADD HKCU\CONSOLE /f /v VirtualTerminalLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 1
For Python 2.7 the following script works for me fine with Windows 10 (v1607)
import os
print '\033[35m'+'color-test'+'\033[39m'+" test end"
os.system('') #enable VT100 Escape Sequence for WINDOWS 10 Ver. 1607
print '\033[35m'+'color-test'+'\033[39m'+" test end"
Result should be:
[35mcolor-test[39m test end
color-test test end
Starting from Windows 10, you can use ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING to enable ANSI escape sequences:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt638032(v=vs.85).aspx
If ANSICON is not acceptable since it requires you to install something on the system, a more lightweight solution that parses and translates the ANSI codes into the relevant Win32 API console functions such as SetConsoleTextAttribute.
https://github.com/mattn/ansicolor-w32.c
For coloring the cmd you need Windows.h and use SetConsoleTextAttribute() more details can be found in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686047%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
In lastest win10, it can be done by SetConsoleMode(originMode | ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING). See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/console-virtual-terminal-sequences#example
Maybe ANSICON can help u
Just download and extract files, depending on your windows os: 32bit or 64bit
Install it with: ansicon -i
I personally like clink. It not only processes ANSI codes, it also adds many other features so Windows Console behaves like bash (history, reverse history search, keyboard shortcuts, etc.):
The same line editing as Bash (from GNU's Readline library).
History persistence between sessions.
Context sensitive completion;
Executables (and aliases).
Directory commands.
Environment variables
Thirdparty tools; Git, Mercurial, SVN, Go, and P4.
New keyboard shortcuts;
Paste from clipboard (Ctrl-V).
Incremental history search (Ctrl-R/Ctrl-S).
Powerful completion (TAB).
Undo (Ctrl-Z).
Automatic "cd .." (Ctrl-PgUp).
Environment variable expansion (Ctrl-Alt-E).
(press Alt-H for many more...)
Scriptable completion with Lua.
Coloured and scriptable prompt.
Auto-answering of the "Terminate batch job?" prompt.
Ansi.sys (in the system32 folder) is an "MSDOS driver" provided as part of Windows XP, 2000, and earlier versions of NT. In 2000 and XP, it is located in the system32 folder (I don't remember the structure of earlier versions of NT). Programs that run in the DOS subsystem and use standard output can use ANSI.SYS just as they could running over MSDOS.
To load ansi.sys, you must use the device= or devicehigh= command in config, just as you would in MSDOS. On Windows NT 5 (2K & XP), each copy of the DOS subsystem can be given a separate config file in the pif/shortcut (use the "advanced" button), and there is a default file called CONFIG.NT (also in the system32 folder), which is used if the pif/shortcut does not specify a special config file.
When ansi.sys is loaded correctly, mem /d will report that it is loaded. On earlier versions of NT, you can and must load a proper DOS environment to load ansi.sys, and ansi art will work at the prompt. On Win 2K and XP, loading ansi.sys will have no effect on your "CMD prompt" because CMD is not a DOS program: it is a 32 bit Windows console program. For some reason that I do not understand, on WinXP, even if you load a fixed copy of command.com using "command.com /p", the command prompt will not be ansi enabled: perhaps when you do it that way it only emulates loading command.com?
In any case, when you use an actual DOS version of command.com, ansi is enabled after being loaded: you can demonstrate it's use with a bit of ansi art like this:
command /c type ansiart.ans
(here is an example: http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/artwork/beastie.ans)
CONFIG.NT (in the system32 folder) contains an example of the syntax for loading device drivers. You will need to be an Administrator to edit that default file, or you can make a copy of it.
On Win 2K and XP, the default "shortcut" for MSDOS is a .PIF file, not a .LNK file. If you create a .lnk file to CMD, you won't be able to set special config and autoexec files, it will use the default CONFIG.NT. If you want to use a special config file for just one DOS application, you can make a copy of the "MSDOS shortcut", or you can make a copy of "_default.pif", found in your Windows folder.
Had the same issue. I installed ConEmu and that one solved my problem.
I found this tool to be working for my end.
Microsoft Color Tool from GitHub
Unzip the compressed file then open CMD with Administration permission.
Go to the folder where you unzip the file in CMD.
Then execute this command "colortool -b scheme-name"
The scheme-name needs to be replaced with any of these options below:
campbell.ini
campbell-legacy.ini
cmd-legacy.ini
deuternopia.itermcolors
OneHalfDark.itermcolors
OneHalfLight.itermcolors
solarized_dark.itermcolors
solarized_light.itermcolors
In my case, the command would be like this "colortool -b solarized_dark.itermcolors"
Click right on the console window and select Properties.
You don't need to change any value just click "OK" to save the setting. (You will notice that your font already contains colors).
Console Property
Then restart your cmd or powerShell.
The ANSI color should be enabled and working with the color scheme you chose before.
Somehow in Windows you just need to call any shell command first, rather call the system function. Just in start of your main method put system("");, and don't forget to include stdlib.h.
I noticed this when I looked at some of my old programs that also used ANSI codes to understand why they work, but my new code is not
I read that apparently MS-DOS and Batch are NOT the same thing, but that's how I've been taught.
I couldn't find sites or a Q&A on it so can anyone help shed some light?
Batch file language is part of MSDos. It has also been part of MSDos successors - OS/2, Windows 16 bit, Win 32 on 9x as a MSDos 7, and on Win NT 32 bit as MSdos 5.5 which is the current one. 64 bit doesn't have MSDos.
In OS/2 IBM engineers tried bolting programming language constructs on to MSDos batch - Microsoft engineers updated this for Windows 2000. To remain compatible with MSDos batch this requires horrible hacks. The two command processors are
command.com - 16 bit MSDos command processor. There are many versions 1,2, 3, 3.3, 4, 5, 6, 6.22, (on 9x) 7, 7.1, (on Win NT) 5.5.
cmd.exe - 32 bit or 64 bit windows command processor that understands MSDos syntax as well. There are two main versions - NT4 and OS/2 and Windows 2000 and later.
In Windows if you type in command.com it sends your command to cmd.exe to be executed.
Try this.
Type in Start - Run
cmd
then in the console window
ver
Then type in Start - Run
command
then in the console window
ver
Then type in Start - Run
command /k ver
ALSO
Just because a program is a console program does not imply that either command processor is involved. It you type ftp in Start - Run only ftp.exe is running in that console.
MS Dos is the Microsoft Disk Operating System nowadays just reffered to as an OS. Windows has now become a part of the Microsoft OS and is a graphical layer allowing much more operability to the end user but we still have access to many DOS based commands.
This is done through the Command Prompt (CMD.EXE).
The Command prompt allows a terminal style (none graphical) environment where we can put together commands to interact with the machine. For example, DIR will give a directory listing for the current directory. These commands can be manipulated with parameters being passed in for example DIR /AD /S will use AD to list all Directories (not files) and /S will recurse through subdirectories.
If you spend any time working in a DOS environment there are many commands you would want to string together, You can create a text file with a .bat extension to allow this, running this "Batch" file will run the commands sequentially one after the other. It is exactly as the name implies, a Batch of commands for it to perform.
The Batch file DOES allow for some basic loops and a GoTo style jump. A perfect example of a Batch file in it's basic form was Autoexec.bat. This was used as your computer booted to fire off commands to load drivers for audio cards / graphics cards / network cards etc.
I STILL use the Command prompt very often, I find it easier to create a batch file from a bunch of formulas in Excel for 1 off repetitive commands and I can do this quicker than I probably could if I were to build a VBA solution to interact with the files.
For work I have to write a simple batch file to backup a directory as part of a maintenance routine. The PCs that need to have their directories backed up are running Windows XP Embedded 2002 SP2. These tools do not have the following command line utilities:
-copy
-xcopy.exe
-robocopy.exe
Is there any method of command line copy that is currently on XPe, if not, is there a 3rd party solution and how would I implement this?
Thank you in advance.
I'm not really sure why, if you can put new files on this machine running an embedded OS, why you wouldn't have just copied xcopy.exe over to it... Anyway, the program you want and is the best for copying large amounts of files/backups is XXCOPY. Check out www.xxcopy.com
I have a legacy VB6 system which is installed in C:/Program Files/IronDuke
In the past it has written some files into this directory. I understand that these files are hidden away if the application is installed under Vista or a later OS, but not if they were written under XP or earlier OS.
How can I retrieve a copy of these 'hidden' files when written under Vista or Windows 7 or 8?
You are looking at a feature called UAC Virtualization, this blog posting gives a pretty good rundown on what is happening and where the files are located.
From above article:
For example, if an application attempts to write to C:\Program Files\Contoso\Settings.ini, and the user does not have permissions to write to that directory (the Program Files), the write operation will be redirected to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Contoso\settings.ini. If an application attempts to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Contoso\ in the registry, it will automatically be redirected to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\Software\Contoso or HKEY_USERS\UserSID_Classes\VirtualStore\Machine\Software\Contoso.
so in your case if you are trying to find the files you need to look in:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\IronDuke\
You cannot write to Program Files under Windows 7 / 8 - system security prevents programs running as regular users from doing so. One option for you is to write these files to the user's profile folder (you'll have to update the VB6 program for this, although the changes should be pretty small if the program is otherwise well-written). This would be your best option since the updated code would work well in the future without more changes.
You amy be able to get the program running using Compatibility Mode but I doubt it - on my Windows 8 system I don't even get 'Windows XP' as a compatibility option anymore. All other options will likely enforce security.
You can try running your program as administrator but I'd only do this if you don't have the source to make the changes - it's poor practice to run programs with all privileges since it opens up the system for attacks.
Is there any way to copy some files from an internal online storage to a local drive by using a *.bat-file on Windows XP?
Due to some strange internal restrictions I am only allowed to use a *.bat-file to do this.
The path to the files, which are to be copied, is kinda "http://files.in-house/section/linkages"
So I tried xcopy (xcopy goto.in-house/section/linkages U:\linkages) in any variations, with quotation marks, without etc. but it does not work
a) is there any way to do this?
b) how?
Very similar to a question asked on SuperUser.com, here. The accepted answer uses vbscript, which is not installed in all WinXP systems. To check if you have it, just type cscript at a command line prompt. If you need to download it, it's here.
The number two answer relies on bitsadmin, which is not part of XP, but can be obtained with the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools.