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Inverse video (SGR 7) โ€‹

Category: sgr ยท Tags: ECMA-48 Standard, VT100 ยท Specification โ†—

ESC [ 7 m
SGR 7 swaps the foreground and background colors of the text. The sequence is ESC [ 7 m. Universally supported. Commonly used for selection highlighting, cursor rendering, and visual emphasis in TUI applications. Reset with SGR 27.
How this is tested: Send \x1b[7mX, verify inverse=true on the cell.
Analysis2026-03-26

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

Supported by 13 of 13 backends (100%)

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.5โœ“ yes

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