display colorized text in a vsplit

[wf5w]

I want to do a vsplit and bring in the text of a file that has ansi escape sequences in the file.
They are not showing up.

So: ^[[92m some text ^[[0m, does not work. although when I print it out on a terminal it works fine.

Alternately, is there some command that can do what I want to display in the vsplit ?

I am wanting to write a "help" buffer for my project that my people can use.

thanks. Nice project so far!

Jerry

[anntnzrb]

Micro does not support ANSI escape sequences in files. Files are displayed as raw bytes without interpreting ANSI codes.

Workarounds:

Option 1: Use dedicated ANSI viewers

cat colorized.txt    # Shows ANSI colors
less -R colorized.txt  # ANSI-aware pager

Option 2: Strip ANSI codes

cat colorized.txt | ansi2txt > plain.txt
micro plain.txt

Option 3: Use syntax highlighting
Convert structured text to use micro's syntax highlighting instead of raw ANSI codes.

Why: Micro reads files as raw bytes and uses its own styling system via tcell, not terminal escape sequences from file content. This is a fundamental architectural decision.

Files: internal/buffer/line_array.go:73-78, internal/display/bufwindow.go

[niten94]

As mentioned by @anntnzrb in #3933 (comment), Micro doesn't currently support ANSI sequences or arbitrary formatting at specific locations.

By "help buffer", may I ask for slightly more details on what you meant and your use case?

If you meant a help file, all I have seen are written in Markdown (.md) including ones provided by third-party plugins. You can write a custom syntax file to highlight some parts using rules, but this likely wouldn't produce results same with ANSI sequences.

[wf5w]

yes. I am writing some amateur radio logging software, for my fellow amateur radio people. I have the logging part covered, with a script. But I wanted to provide help in my own help file, for the key bindings that I have made.

I had bound the Alt-Shift-? to my own little help file with command:vsplit myhelp.txt

I wanted to colorize some keywords in that file, I guess it could be underlined with markdown (haven't tried that yet). But colorized keywords would have added that touch of class to it.

[wf5w]

After all the answers here, the best that I could come up with was:

1. wrote a script named microhelp in my PATH, that essentially did a cat of the myhelp.txt file
2. myhelp.txt file has ANSI escape sequences for color.
3. did a keybinding of "Alt-?": "term microhelp"

now when pressing the Alt-? it displays my help file with color.