IRC Colors (or mIRC Colors) is a light-weight sub-protocol designed to added support for various text formatting to IRC. The protocol usually supports foreground, background, bold, italics, underline, and reverse.

Overview

Text formatting is done via a set of special character sequences that are parsed by the IRC client. Every new text format starts with one of the formatting control character. The same control character can be used at the end of the format in order to terminate it. The caret notation is used to represent such characters. For example, the ^B character is used to specify bold text. ^BHello World^B will display on supported IRC client as Hello World

Format characters

Most clients support at least bold and underline. Below are the common shortcuts for those characters:

Format	Code point	Shortcuts	Example
Bold	0x02	Ctrl+B / ⌘ Cmd+B	^BAA^BBB^BCC^BDD = AABBCCDD
Italics	0x1D	Ctrl+I / ⌥ Opt+⌘ Cmd+I	^IAA^IBB^ICC^IDD = AABBCCDD
Underline	0x1F	Ctrl+U / ⌥ Opt+⌘ Cmd+U	^UAA^UBB^UCC^UDD = AABBCCDD
Reverse	0x16	Ctrl+R / ⌥ Opt+⌘ Cmd+R	^RAA^RBB^RCC^RDD = AABBCCDD
Plain	0x0F	Ctrl+O / ⌥ Opt+⌘ Cmd+O	^I^B^UAAA^OBBB = AAABBB

The plain text character is used to restore all formatting back to default.