Color Output on Windows - adamjmurray/mtk GitHub Wiki

The mtk command line tutorial mtk -t attempts to use ANSI terminal color. This should work out-of-the-box on OS X and Linux, but requires some effort to get working on Windows.

On Windows you have a few options:

  1. Use Ansicon (download link near top of page).
  • Either follow the installation instructions on the Ansicon github page or simply double click the executable (32-bit or 64-bit as appropriate for you system) to launch a color-enabled command prompt.
  • Use MinGW with the MSYS terminal:
    • Install MinGW from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ (see "Looking for latest version?" link).
    • During installation, on the "Select Components" screen, install the following:
      • MSYS Basic System
    • Edit C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\home\YOUR_USERNAME.inputrc , look for the output-meta option and change it to:
      • set output-meta on
    • Launch the MSYS shell via the "MinGW Shell" shortcut (or C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat).

In theory you can also use Cygin but I have had a lot of problems running Ruby under Cygwin so I recommend MinGW instead. If you install Ruby via Cygwin's package manager, it might work ok?