IRC Colors (or mIRC Colors) is a light-weight sub-protocol designed to add 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 segment of text formats 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

While originally designed to be exclusively client-side, over time servers have been updated to be made aware of color codes. Some servers support various channel modes to block colors, strip colors, and ban various patterns. The exact level of support depends on the server software used.

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.

Color formatting

The sub-protocol supports both background and foreground coloring via the 0x03 code point. On most IRC clients, the character can be generated via the Ctrl+K shortcut key ((Ctrl+C) in irssi). The syntax for coloring text is ^KN (^CN in irssi) for just foreground color or ^KN,M (^CN,M in irssi) for a background color as well. Where N and M represent any integer between 0 and 15 inclusively, allowing up to sixteen colors. ^K alone can be used to terminate the previous sequence of colored text.

While most client allow the user to change the meaning of those values, the default values are:

Value	Name	RGB	HTML
0	White	255,255,255	#FFFFFF
1	Black	0,0,0	#000000
2	Navy	0,0,127	#00007F
3	Green	0,147,0	#009300
4	Red	255,0,0	#FF0000
5	Maroon	127,0,0	#7F0000
6	Purple	156,0,156	#9C009C
7	Orange	252,127,0	#FC7F00
8	Yellow	255,255,0	#FFFF00
9	Light Green	0,252,0	#00FC00
10	Teal	0,147,147	#009393
11	Cyan	0,255,255	#00FFFF
12	Royal blue	0,0,252	#0000FC
13	Magenta	255,0,255	#FF00FF
14	Gray	127,127,127	#7F7F7F
15	Light Gray	210,210,210	#D2D2D2

Any new sequence of colors will override the previous (or default). If the ^K character is used without any numbers, it will reset the text format back to default. If a color sequence defines a background color and a new color sequence starts without a background color, the previous background color will be used. For example ^K0,1Hello ^4There! will generate the Hello There!

Using the ^K character as a color terminator will not terminate any other kind of formatting such as bold. For example ^B^K0,1Hello ^KThere! will generate Hello There! where the bold continues on to the rest of the line. Using the ^O key, however, will restore all formats to default from that point onward.