Use Curses or ANSI escape sequences. Before you start spouting escape sequences, you should check that stdout is a tty. You can do this with sys.stdout.isatty()
. Here's a function pulled from a project of mine that prints output in red or green, depending on the status, using ANSI escape sequences:
def hilite(string, status, bold):
attr = []
if status:
# green
attr.append('32')
else:
# red
attr.append('31')
if bold:
attr.append('1')
return '\x1b[%sm%s\x1b[0m' % (';'.join(attr), string)