Discord Messages with Colors

Discord is now slowly rolling out the ability to send colored messages within code blocks. It uses the ANSI color codes, so if you've tried to print colored text in your terminal or console with Python or other languages then it will be easy for you.

Quick Explanation

To be able to send a colored text, you need to use the ansi language for your code block and provide a prefix of this format before writing your text:

\u001b[{format};{color}m

\u001b is the unicode escape for ESCAPE/ESC, meant to be used in the source of your bot (see http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/001B.html). If you wish to send colored text without using your bot you need to copy the character from the website.

After you've written this, you can now type the text you wish to color. If you want to reset the color back to normal, then you need to use the \u001b[0m prefix again.

Formats

Here is the list of values you can use to replace {format}:

  • 0: Normal
  • 1: Bold
  • 4: Underline

Colors

Here is the list of values you can use to replace {color}:

Text Colors

  • 30: Gray
  • 31: Red
  • 32: Green
  • 33: Yellow
  • 34: Blue
  • 35: Pink
  • 36: Cyan
  • 37: White

Background Colors

  • 40: Firefly dark blue
  • 41: Orange
  • 42: Marble blue
  • 43: Greyish turquoise
  • 44: Gray
  • 45: Indigo
  • 46: Light gray
  • 47: White

Example

Let's take an example, I want a bold green colored text with the firefly dark blue background. I simply use \u001b[0;40m (background color) and \u001b[1;32m (text color) as prefix. Note that the order is important, first you give the background color and then the text color.

Alternatively you can also directly combine them into a single prefix like the following: \u001b[1;40;32m and you can also use multiple values. Something like \u001b[1;40;4;32m would underline the text, make it bold, make it green and have a dark blue background.

Raw message:

```ansi
\u001b[0;40m\u001b[1;32mThat's some cool formatted text right?
or
\u001b[1;40;32mThat's some cool formatted text right?
```

Result:

Background and text color result

ANSI Colors Showcase

The way the colors look like on Discord is shown in the image below:

ANSI Colors

Message sent to get the output of above can be found here.

Disclaimer

Note: The change has been brought to all stable desktop clients. Since syntax highlighting on mobile is far behind, ANSI is not supported on mobile as well. Refer to this gist for other syntax highlighting methods.