Steps

Having colored text in the command line is a great help for spotting error or success messages. Unfortunately, those of us developing under Windows do not have this feature by default. Here’s how to enable it.

Download ANSICON from: https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon Extract the proper files (Depending on if you have a 32 or 64 bit machine) to c:\ansicon\ (For example). I have a 32 bit machine and hence I extracted the files from inside the x86 folder. Open an elevated privilege command line prompt and go to c:\ansicon, and then type “ansicon -i” without the quotes Add c:\ansicon to your path environment variable

Done. You can now enjoy the colored output of PHPUnit for example.

Extra Notes and Updates

Note: I have installed ANSICON 1.3 under Windows 7 x86 (32 bits). My best guess is that this process will work for other versions of Windows too.

Update: I have installed ANSICON 1.61 under Windows 8 x64 (64 bits) and it works perfectly. The above steps are also updated to work under Windows 8.

Update: I have written a new post on how to Generate Command Line Colors with PHP