Enable Bold Text in Windows Terminal

[bitcrazed]

From @agocke on April 27, 2017 22:5

Repro: echo -e "text \033[1mbold\033[0m text"

This prints the following for me:

bold should actually be bold, not just another color in the color palette. It also shouldn't change the foreground color.

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.15063]

Copied from original issue: microsoft/WSL#2027

[bitcrazed]

From @sunjoong on April 27, 2017 23:17

@agocke - lt looks not bold but bright. Effect of code 1 is "Bold or increased intensity -- ANSI escape code".

[bitcrazed]

From @zadjii-msft on April 27, 2017 23:24

@agocke that's exactly right. We don't support proper bold at the moment, but the intensity works just fine for now. Like with all feature requests, it's already on the backlog :)

[bitcrazed]

From @agocke on April 27, 2017 23:29

@zadjii-msft How do you decide what "intensity" means in this context? It seems to pick a different color from the palette, i.e. I can actually change the color that is printed by bold and it can be completely different from the normal color.

This is important because if I change the color scheme for my 8 foreground colors, what happens to my bold colors? It seems like sometimes nothing may happen, which means the bold colors show up as unreadable in my new color scheme.

[bitcrazed]

From @fpqc on April 28, 2017 3:6

@agocke This is pretty standard for terminal emulators. The 'bright' colors are the second row of 8 colors in programs that have a sane color picking interface =p.

[bitcrazed]

From @agocke on April 28, 2017 3:26

Yeah, I think I screwed up the transcription from my .Xresources. Still, bold would be useful.

[bitcrazed]

From @dgilmour77 on November 14, 2017 15:45

This creates a bit of a trap for unwary users. I like black text on dark grey background, and when I set it, it looked great. Until I brought up a man page and it looked garbled and broken because I was unlucky that the bold color automatically chosen was the same as my background color - dark grey. At a minimum, the logic for choosing a bold color should be based not just on the foreground color but the foreground/background combination. Yeah, good luck with that ;-)

[j4james]

If you do decide to implement this, is there any chance it could be made an option? Using the SGR bold (increased intensity) parameter to generate 16 colors has been a de facto standard (at least in the DOS world) for what must be decades now. And I think the default Linux console might work that way too actually. It would be sad to lose that functionality if you change it to bold instead.

I realise there are there are now other ways of getting bright colors, but that's obviously going to be a breaking change for old code, not to mention all that glorious ANSI artwork from the BBS era.

[bitcrazed]

@agocke: "Still, bold would be useful"

Bold is a little tricky because it actually changes the physical size & shape of letters and, depending on what fonts you use, sometimes ends up looking pretty awful.

Alas, the Console's current text renderer uses GDI which is > 30 years old and lacks much of the sophistication of modern text rendering technologies like DirectWrite.

Console's GDI renderer can't currently handle bold text:

But VSCode's integrated terminal takes advantage of Chrome which takes advantage of DirectWrite:

We are planning on replacing our GDI renderer with a DirectWrite renderer in the future which will allows us to (finally) render bold text, emoji, and all manner of other beautiful text effects, but until then, the best we can do is display "bold" text with a more intense color.

HTH.