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Standard bg colors (SGR 40-47) โ€‹

Category: sgr ยท Tags: ECMA-48 Standard ยท Specification โ†—

ESC [ 40โ€“47 m
SGR 40-47 set the background color to one of 8 standard colors: black (40), red (41), green (42), yellow (43), blue (44), magenta (45), cyan (46), white (47). Universally supported. As with foreground colors, the actual RGB values depend on the terminal's configured color scheme.
How this is tested: Send \x1b[42mX (green bg), verify the cell's background color has a green channel > 100.
Analysis2026-03-26

Supported by all 8 tested terminals โ€” universal adoption. Part of the Core TUI baseline.

Supported by 12 of 13 backends (92%)

Terminal Applications โ€‹

TerminalVersionSupportNotes
iTerm23.6.9โœ“ yes
Ghostty1.3.1โœ“ yes
VS Code1.112.0โœ“ yes
Warp0.2026.03.18.08.24.03โœ“ yes
Cursor2.6.21โœ“ yes
tmux3.6aโœ“ yes
Kitty0.46.2โœ“ yes
Terminal.app2.15โœ“ yes
GNU Screen5.0.1โœ“ yes

Headless Backends โ€‹

Parser correctness only โ€” a โœ“ means the parser accepts the sequence.

BackendVersionSupportNotes
Alacritty0.26.0โœ“ yes
vt1000.2.1โœ“ yes
vterm0.2.0โœ“ yes
WezTerm0.1.0-fork.5~ partialBackend returns palette index instead of resolved RGB

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