*** THE SCREEN *** Avios supports Ansi colour codes (the same ones as the NUTS talker system) and so can be used to send coloured messages to people using telnet clients that also support colour. Colour commands are used to generate these colours and can be embedded in any string in an AviosPL program. When this string is sent out it will get translated into colour codes so long as the string is being sent to STDOUT and colour is turned on either via the init file or by the AviosPL "colour" command. Bear in mind that if you're on a black and white or green screen terminal all you'll get is various shades of grey/green instead of colours (if you get anything at all). All the commands start with a ~. The following commands are related but are not actually colour commands but also affect the text: RS - reset terminal to default colour status RV - reverse video OL - bold LI - blink/flash text (only the text flashes , not the background colour). This won't work on all terminals , some xterms simply set it to bold. UL - underline text, this doesn't work on all terminals. CL - Clear screen. (Does same as cls command) FK - set foreground colour to black FR - foreground red FG - green FY - yellow (though it looks an orangey brown on some systems) FB - blue FM - magenta/purple FT - turquoise/bright blue FW - white BK - set background colour to black BR - red BG - green BY - yellow BB - blue BM - magenta BT - turqouise BW - white So if for instance you wanted some flashing magenta "hello" on a green background followed by a non-flashing blue "world" on a black background you would do the following: printnl "~FM~LI~BGhello ~RS~FBworld" Notice the use of the reset (RS) to reset the background to black and the text to non-flashing (assuming you're using a white text on black screen VDU). Also note that an automatic reset is sent after every \n and \0 so the colours set do not carry over to the next line as long as colour is set to ON. If you are writing to a file or a process created socket (using connect) then colour commands are left untouched and are passed out with the string. If you are writing to STDOUT and colour is OFF the commands will be stripped from the string but no codes will replace them. If colour is ON codes will replace them. You can print out colour commands as themselves if writing to STDOUT by prepending them with a forward slash '/'. For example: printnl "/~FMtest" This would print out '~FMtest' to the screen minus the slash. *** REMEMBER *** Not everyones terminal supports ANSI colour codes. It'll either ignore them or will produce some very strange effects. Bear this in mind if you decide to set the user colour default to ON. In 1.5.0 I have added the locate command which will (for vt and ansi terminals) place the cursor at the given co-ordinates. See the commands documentation for more details or the bounce program in avprogs.