Matlab’s Command Window text is notorious for its boring black & white appearance when sending output via the built-in fprintf or disp commands. Back in 2009, I explained the undocumented ability to display red or hyperlinked ^[1] text using fprintf, or colored and underlined text using my cprintf utility ^[2]. I followed this up last year with the relatively new ability to display bold text formatting ^[3], using either fprintf or cprintf.
A short while ago, Carsten Allefeld (a regular on this blog) alerted me to the fact that recent Matlab releases have added yet another undocumented feature, this time the ability to specify orange formatting to the output text. This made sense: after all, recent releases have started to display warnings as orange text on STDOUT. While errors have for ages been rendered red by the simple act of directing their output to STDERR, warnings are output to STDOUT and so a bypass was naturally devised. This is similar to the <strong> bypass that I explained last year, for the bold formatting. By redirecting STDOUT, Carsten was able to see that by adding '[\b...]\b' to the output text, anything between the brackets was given an orange color. Of course, we can still use cprintf to display any color in the rainbow, orange included:

disp(['this is [' 8 'orange]' 8 ' text'])

The [\b sequence is reminiscent of the CSI ANSI sequence ^[4] used in days of yore, on non-graphic consoles. In those old days, we used the ESC-[ sequence to add text formatting to the console text. Perhaps some MathWorker was nostalgic. Note the related FEX utility tcprintf ^[5], which implements ANSI sequences for color-coding the Matlab console output.
<editorial>
If you ask me, this is an example of bad design: instead of modifying fprintf to enable generic color and text formatting, the developer hard-coded a specific [\b hack for a specific color, and a different specific <strong> hack for bold formatting. If tomorrow a green color or underlined text will be needed, they’ll need to modify the hard-coding and extend it with yet new hard-coding. Moreover, the [\b hack does not enable multiple segments of orange colors in the same text, a natural extension. In their shoes, I’d probably have extended the <strong> paradigm with something like <font color="orange"> or: <span style="color:#FF8000;"> (I wonder where I got this idea from? hmm…) Maybe I’m just being too harsh: it’s obviously easier to bitch from the benches than to score at the field…
</editorial>
Anyway, if you only need black, red and orange colors in your text, you need look no further than fprintf. If, however, you require your outputs to be a bit more lively, then consider using cprintf ^[2]:

6 Comments To "Another Command Window text color hack"

#1 Comment By Chandrakanth On November 7, 2013 @ 10:19

#2 Comment By GeertvdWal On November 12, 2013 @ 09:57

 
>> error
Error using error
Not enough input arguments.

 
fprintf(1,' [12]\n',...
    'matlab:%% do stuff',...
    'bold blue hyperlink'...
    )

#3 Comment By Yair Altman On November 12, 2013 @ 10:15

#4 Comment By Marie Kris On December 3, 2013 @ 19:18

#5 Comment By Andriy On June 13, 2016 @ 17:10

for k=0:10, fprintf('abcd'); fprintf(['12345',repmat('\b',1,k),'67890\n']); end;
for k=0:10, fprintf('abcd'); fprintf(['12345',repmat('\t',1,k),'67890\n']); end;
 

#6 Comment By Yair Altman On June 14, 2016 @ 12:14