You can actually set an environmental variable with any color code you want: STDERRED_ESC_CODE. As for color codes in stderr, they work in most cases. If all

You can actually set an environmental variable with any color code you want: STDERRED_ESC_CODE. As for color codes in stderr, they work in most cases. If all the color codes are in a single write(), it will more or less be unaffected by the extra red and reset color codes that get stuck on either end.