Little things that make live easier #4: writing colored text in cmd.exe

A constant source of frustration when using cmd.exe is that it seems impossible to write colored text easily, unlike other shells (although I don't consider cmd.exe to be a shell). Yet, if powershell is installed, then it's possible to write such colored text. Here's a powershell script (c:\temp\colors.ps1):

write-host "" write-host " " -noNewLine write-host "Warning" -foregroundColor red -backgroundColor yellow write-host " " -noNewLine write-host "-------" -foregroundColor blue write-host " Wearing headphones doesn't" -foregroundColor red write-host " make farts silent." -foregroundColor red

When executed with something like

powershell -executionpolicy bypass c:/temp/colors.ps1

It prints