#1567 Missing support for ANSI color codes

[Eric S. Raymond]

Currently xchat supports only mIRC color codes. These have a design defect; because they are vartiable length and there is no end delimiter, a mIRC color code immediately followed by text consisting of decimal digits may result in one or more text digits being eaten and an incorrect color change.

This caused me real problems in irker <http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/> which often has to emit a color code followed by the hex digits of a git commit ID. Because of it, I've dropped mIRC highlighting. Now my xchat users are complaining.

Please implement recognition of ANSI color codes as (for example) ChatZilla does. Documentation at, for example, http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm

[Peter Zelezny.]

I understand the limitations of mIRC codes, but there are simple practical ways around delimeter problem. For example you could make your colour codes two digits .e.g "\00301<hex>" instead of "\0031<hex>", or turn on and off bold: \002\002, then any following number digit will be interpreted as a literal. This works in mIRC & xchat.

Support for escape codes is unlikely to materialise any time soon.