TOPIC

Today’s software makes great use of pretty styles, gradient shading, sliding effects, 3-D buttons, eye-catching charts, splashy graphics, and more ways to make them attractive and user-friendly. But if all you need (or are restricted to) is a simple console app, it’s appearance can seem so dull in comparison. Even adding a line of dashes or making letters all upper-case doesn’t start to compare.

There is a way to add color, control screen placement, and more when generating console output if you dive into the ANSI Escape Sequences that most terminals support. But printing out long, ugly strings of characters just to make your console apps look cool is probably not a meaningful use of your time. Fortunately, there are several open-source libraries that have packaged all these up into nice classes you can call from Delphi.

We’ll take a look at a few of them tonight, along with some slick demos that take you far beyond the blinking cursor.

Libraries:

• Quick.Console Write log message to console with colors and more (part of QuickLib by Exilon Software)
• Consoles a replacement for the old Turbo Pascal DOS Crt unit (from Rudy Velthuis)
• DelphiConsole C# class ported to Delphi (JensBorrisholt)
• EasyConsole Simple menu interface for Delphi console apps (JensBorrisholt)
• Console Modern console utility class for Delphi from tinyBigGAMES
• VSoft.AnsiConsole A Delphi library for writing rich, interactive console applications - the “Cadillac” of these repositories! (ported from Spectre.Console by Vincent Parrett)
• VSoft.System.Console A Delphi port of the .NET System.Console class and the single dependeny of VSoft.AnsiConsole (by Vincent Parrett)

Extra Reading

• Terminal escape codes are awesome, here’s why Deep dive into the history and technical details
• SpectreConsole.net Documents a C# class but is a great companion read with many explanations

DATE/TIME

Wednesday, August 19, 2026 6:00 - 8:00 PM

LOCATION

Olive Garden in Lake Oswego
6355 SW Meadows Rd.
Lake Oswego, OR 97035