Discord Colored Text: Generator and ANSI Color Codes

How colored text works in Discord

Discord's markdown has no color syntax: bold, italics and headers are as far as ordinary text goes. Inside a code block, though, Discord highlights code by its language, and the ansi language reads the color codes terminals use. Each code is the escape character (ESC), a left bracket, numbers separated by semicolons and the letter m. ESC[31m turns the text after it red; ESC[0m puts everything back to normal.

The escape character is invisible and cannot be typed on a keyboard, which is why colored text is copied from a generator rather than written by hand. In the example below it is written \u001b so you can see where it goes; in Discord it has to be the real character, and in a bot or a webhook's JSON you write it exactly as \u001b.

```ansi
\u001b[1;31mBold red\u001b[0m and normal text, then \u001b[32mgreen\u001b[0m.
```

Text and background color codes

Each color has a text code and a background code ten higher. The bright set (✦) is drawn only by Discord's newer renderer; the next section shows what every reader gets.

What each color looks like in each theme

The named colors are theme colors: Discord picks a shade for each of its four appearance themes so the text stays readable. These are the values it uses, measured from Discord's own stylesheet in October 2026. Black is pure black in every theme, so it disappears on Onyx; white is the same light gray everywhere, and bright white is pure white.

Bold, underline, italic and strikethrough codes

Codes combine in one sequence: ESC[1;4;32m is bold, underlined green. Discord applies every reset in a sequence before any new style, so ESC[0;31m — reset, then red — is the safe way to switch from one style to the next, and it is what the generator writes. Dim (2), blink (5), reverse (7) and hidden (8) do nothing in Discord.

Any color: RGB and 256-color codes

Discord's newer renderer also reads the two extended color forms terminals use. ESC[38;2;R;G;Bm sets the text to any RGB color — ESC[38;2;255;122;0m is orange — and 48;2 does the same for the background. ESC[38;5;Nm picks entry N of the standard 256-color table: 0–15 are the sixteen named colors above, 16–231 a six-step color cube and 232–255 grays from near black to near white.

There is a trade-off. The named colors follow each reader's theme, so Discord keeps them readable on Light and on Onyx alike; an RGB color is the same everywhere, so a dark blue that reads well on Light can all but vanish on Onyx. Use named colors for anything people must read and keep RGB for accents.

What every reader sees

Since October 2026 Discord has been moving accounts to a new code renderer (in the web client it is the experiment 2026-03-arborium-highlight). Until it reaches everyone, two renderers read the same message differently:

• Text styled with a code the older renderer does not draw simply shows uncolored there, so a message never breaks — it just loses some color for those readers.
• Discord's phone apps have long shown an ansi block as plain code without any color. Treat color as decoration and keep the meaning in the words: a status should still say ONLINE or OFFLINE.

Colored text from a bot or a webhook

In code, write the escape inside the string: \u001b in JSON, JavaScript, Java and C#, or \x1b in Python and most shells. A webhook carries it the same way in its JSON body, and the code block colors the same in plain content, an embed description or a Components V2 Text Display — so a webhook sent with cURL or from Python can post colored text without a bot.

Every escape sequence counts toward the message's character limit. ESC[0;1;31m is nine characters and an RGB sequence about eighteen, so per-letter rainbow effects run out of room long before a 2,000-character message does. The generator counts them for you.

{
  "content": "```ansi\n\u001b[1;32mDeploy finished\u001b[0m in 42s\n```"
}

// discord.js
await channel.send("```ansi\n\u001b[1;31mBuild failed\u001b[0m\n```");

# discord.py
await channel.send("```ansi\n\x1b[1;31mBuild failed\x1b[0m\n```")

Why older color lists look wrong

Guides written before August 2026 describe a fixed palette in which 30 was gray and the backgrounds had names like firefly dark blue, marble blue and greyish turquoise. In August 2026 Discord moved the ansi colors into its themes: 30 is now true black, each background uses the same shade as its text color, and every color is tuned per theme, as in the table above. The codes themselves did not change, so older colored messages still render, just in the new shades.

Other ways to color text

Before ansi blocks people colored text with other code-block languages, and one still works: in a diff block, lines starting with + are tinted green and lines starting with - are tinted red. Only ansi can color individual words in the middle of a line.

Outside code blocks Discord colors names and role mentions with the role's color, and an embed or Components V2 container carries an accent color on its edge — but none of these color the words you write. For everything else Discord formats, see the text formatting guide and live preview.