There's no escaping it: an exploration of ANSI codes

ANSI escape codes are kinda crazy, no? I mean, crazy in the sense that they are such a simple and enduring concept. Every time your terminal renders bold red text or a progress bar crawls across the screen, you’re taking advantage of a standard that is almost 50 years old. I’m not the biggest computing history buff, but I think understanding and admiring these standards can give us a greater appreciation for our industry, and a sense of how the standards that we are building today might scale for the next fifty years of computing. With that in mind, let’s dive into ANSI escape codes.