Usually you use ANSI codes for colors. This will assume that the console is an ANSI terminal or ANSI terminal emulator. ANSI codes usually look like escape sequences. e.g. <ESC>[32m (set to green). If you are coding under unix, you can look at the termcaps file to determine what to output for whatever terminal you are using. Then again, you could always go with a GUI or web app, and use fonts and colors. But that’s getting away from your question. I may be wrong, but I believe the cmd window supports ANSI.