Coloured texted in console/terminal

Question

Using ncurses in C++, how would I colour my text in a console/terminal without breaking MinGW support? Are there any other libraries that can do this? I know that you can do it with ASCII characters, but this isn't fully supported. I don't want to use the Windows API.

Answer 1

The discussion in the other answer is regarding Windows, so for the benefit of Win readers, I'm leaving this answer even though it is not cross-platform.

The Old New Thing blog covers some of the Win32 API that can be used to change text color in the console. See FillConsoleOutputAttribute and Console Screen Buffers.