I was a little disappointed by the explanation – I was expecting this to dive deep into how ANSI code came to be, and how they worked. Not just "hey they exist

I was a little disappointed by the explanation – I was expecting this to dive deep into how ANSI code came to be, and how they worked. Not just "hey they exist and are neat." You're probably better off reading the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code Some of the much more interesting codes are the ones that control cursor positioning and redrawing, and are used to create ASCII UIs by libraries like ncurses & readline, and programs like vim & tmux. I've written a rudimentary chat interface using native ANSI code, which was quite a bit trickier than it looks, but a fun exercise. The tricky part was ensuring that an interactive line of input remained at the bottom of the screen, while the chat room history keeps scrolling above[1]. https://github.com/ChartBoost/zmq-examples/blob/master/chat/client.rb https://github.com/ChartBoost/zmq-examples/blob/master/chat/... [1]: of course, if you're actually building something for production, don't be an idiot like me and use a real library like ncurses.