.Net: Supported Console Colors

by Juan Carlos · July 25, 2016

.Net: Supported Console Colors

The days of writing applications that write to the console seem to be over for a while now. Notwithstanding, we find ourselves using the console from time to time to help us debug or quickly test application logic. In my case, I am currently using the console to monitor logging information from my application. It is terribly useful to be able to see progress as it happens. It sort of reminds me of using tail -f in Ubuntu against a log file. As part of my effort to make this log reading more easy I decided I wanted to color code the messages based on what they were: Errors / Warnings / Info / Debug, etc. I kept asking myself if Windows is able to support colored console as Ubuntu does, and I am happy to report it does! So here is when the question arises:

What colors are supported and how to use them?

Thankfully there is an enumeration to help us answer this question:

ConsoleColor

	Member name	Description
	Black	The color black.
	Blue	The color blue.
	Cyan	The color cyan (blue-green).
	DarkBlue	The color dark blue.
	DarkCyan	The color dark cyan (dark blue-green).
	DarkGray	The color dark gray.
	DarkGreen	The color dark green.
	DarkMagenta	The color dark magenta (dark purplish-red).
	DarkRed	The color dark red.
	DarkYellow	The color dark yellow (ochre).
	Gray	The color gray.
	Green	The color green.
	Magenta	The color magenta (purplish-red).
	Red	The color red.
	White	The color white.
	Yellow	The color yellow.

.Net: Supported Console Colors