Free Tool
Discord Color Text Generator
Pick your colors, preview the result in all four Discord themes, and copy a message with the invisible escape characters already in place.
Updated for Discord’s 2026 changes
August’s new palette, where backgrounds changed completely and colors shift with the reader’s theme, plus October’s rollout of italic, strikethrough and RGB.
The escape character is included
Copy puts the real invisible U+001B on your clipboard, which is the one thing you cannot type.
Runs in your browser
Nothing is uploaded or stored, and there is no account. Your message never leaves the page.
Generator
Each segment is a run of text with its own color. Add one per color you want, then copy the block at the bottom.
Your message
Discord preview
Server status: ONLINE Next maintenance Friday 02:00 UTC
Colours shown are Discord’s August 2026 palette for the Ash theme. The same codes look different in each theme — switch above to check yours.
Message to paste
```ansi Server status: [1;32mONLINE[0m [37mNext maintenance [0m[4;33mFriday 02:00 UTC[0m ```
The ESC characters are invisible here, exactly as they will be in Discord. Use Copy — selecting this text by hand usually drops them.
What Discord changed in 2026
For years Discord rendered ANSI codes with a fixed Solarized palette. In August 2026 it swapped that out, and two things changed that most guides on this topic have not caught up with. Then, in early October, it started widening which codes it reads at all.
Backgrounds are different colors now. Codes 40 to 47 used to be an unrelated set with no counterpart in the text row — it included a blurple, a cream white, and three near-identical grays. They are now simply the eight text hues, so 41 is a red background because 31 is red text.
| Code | Before (Solarized) | Now |
|---|---|---|
| 40 | Blueish black | Black |
| 41 | Rust brown | Red |
| 42 | Gray (40%) | Green |
| 43 | Gray (45%) | Brown |
| 44 | Light gray (55%) | Light Blue |
| 45 | Blurple | Pink |
| 46 | Light gray (60%) | Teal |
| 47 | Cream white | Light Gray |
Colors follow the reader’s theme. The old palette was one fixed set of hexes for everybody. The new one is defined per theme, so the same message looks different to someone on Light than to someone on Onyx. Two consequences worth knowing: a color you picked because it looked right in Dark may be much heavier in Light, and 30 is pure black in every theme, which makes it unreadable for anyone using a dark theme unless you pair it with a background.
The preview in the generator switches between all four, so you can check a message the way your readers will actually see it.
More codes, rolling out from October 2026. Discord has begun accepting 3 italic, 9 strikethrough, and 24-bit color: 38;2;R;G;B for text and 48;2;R;G;B for backgrounds, any RGB value you like. Discord has not documented it; generator authors and users first spotted it as an experiment in mid-2026, and it began reaching far more accounts in the first week of October. Until it reaches everyone, readers without it lose those styles, which is why the generator above sticks to the eight classic colors.
How Discord colored text works
Discord has no color syntax in normal messages. The only route is a code block tagged ansi, which makes Discord read ANSI escape sequences — the same ones that color a terminal.
```ansi
\u001b[1;32mDeploy finished\u001b[0m
```Read that sequence left to right: \u001b is the ESC character, [ opens the sequence, 1;32 is bold plus green, and m ends it. Everything after that is colored until \u001b[0m resets it.
The \u001b shown above is notation, not something you type. In a real message that spot holds a single invisible character. This is the reason copying a code sample off a web page usually produces gray text — the character does not survive the trip.
Text colors (30–37)
| Code | Name | Light | Ash | Dark | Onyx |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | Black | #000000 | #000000 | #000000 | #000000 |
| 31 | Red | #e75858 | #ec6361 | #de464a | #d22d39 |
| 32 | Green | #399b5d | #45a366 | #1b8d4d | #008043 |
| 33 | Brown | #c07600 | #ce8100 | #b36c00 | #a56100 |
| 34 | Light Blue | #3789ea | #4591ec | #1a7ce6 | #006dd4 |
| 35 | Pink | #e444bb | #f549c9 | #d53fae | #bc3699 |
| 36 | Teal | #0098a3 | #049faa | #008995 | #007c87 |
| 37 | Light Gray | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc |
Background colors (40–47)
| Code | Name | Light | Ash | Dark | Onyx |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | Black | #000000 | #000000 | #000000 | #000000 |
| 41 | Red | #e75858 | #ec6361 | #de464a | #d22d39 |
| 42 | Green | #399b5d | #45a366 | #1b8d4d | #008043 |
| 43 | Brown | #c07600 | #ce8100 | #b36c00 | #a56100 |
| 44 | Light Blue | #3789ea | #4591ec | #1a7ce6 | #006dd4 |
| 45 | Pink | #e444bb | #f549c9 | #d53fae | #bc3699 |
| 46 | Teal | #0098a3 | #049faa | #008995 | #007c87 |
| 47 | Light Gray | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc | #b6b7bc |
Styles
Three work for every reader whose client renders ansi at all: 0 reset, 1 bold, and 4 underline. 3 italic and 9 strikethrough are part of the October 2026 rollout above, so not everyone sees them yet. Combine values in one sequence with semicolons, in any order, as long as a 0 comes first: it resets everything before it.
Why colored text stops working
- The ESC character got dropped
- By far the most common cause. ESC is U+001B, an invisible control character. If you retyped an example, or selected an example with the mouse, it is gone and Discord shows plain monospace. Use the Copy button above.
- The block is not tagged ansi
- Three backticks alone give an untagged code block, which never reads color codes. It has to be ```ansi, with no space between the backticks and the word.
- Single backticks instead of three
- One backtick makes inline code. Inline code takes no language tag at all, so escape sequences stay literal.
- No reset at the end
- Without ESC[0m, the color runs on to everything after it inside the block. The generator closes every segment for you.
Mobile
Desktop and the browser render ansi blocks in color. The iOS and Android apps are the weak spot: for years they showed the blocks as plain monospace, and reports still conflict, with some users seeing color on recent versions and others, as recently as late 2025, finding every color and bold code stripped. Treat color as an enhancement rather than something every reader will see — the text itself is always legible either way.
Frequently asked questions
- Can you get colored text on Discord?
- Yes, but only inside a code block tagged ansi. Open a message with three backticks followed immediately by the word ansi, put an ANSI escape sequence in front of your text, and close with three backticks. There is no color option in the message box itself and no way to color a normal message.
- What does ``` do in Discord?
- Three backticks open a multi-line code block. Adding a language name straight after them, like ansi or diff, tells Discord how to highlight the contents. The ansi language is the one that reads color escape codes; every other language applies its own syntax highlighting instead.
- How to type colored text?
- You cannot fully type it, because the sequence starts with ESC (U+001B), an invisible control character no keyboard produces. Typing the six characters backslash-u-0-0-1-b does nothing. Use the generator on this page and press Copy, which puts the real control character on your clipboard.
- How to get rainbow text on Discord?
- Split the text into one segment per letter or word and give each a different color, cycling through codes 31 to 36 (red, green, brown, blue, pink, teal). Add a segment per letter in the generator above and click a different swatch on each. With the classic codes a rainbow is a repeating six-step cycle; a smooth gradient needs the RGB codes Discord began rolling out in October 2026, which not every reader has yet.
- Did Discord change its ANSI colors?
- Yes, twice in 2026. In August Discord replaced the old Solarized palette: codes 40 to 47 used to be an unrelated set that included a blurple and a cream white, and they are now the same eight hues as the text colors, and every color now shifts with the reader's theme (Light, Ash, Dark, Onyx). In early October it started rolling out italic, strikethrough and full RGB colors on top.
- Can you use custom hex or RGB colors in Discord?
- Starting in October 2026, partly. Discord began rolling out 24-bit color: ESC[38;2;R;G;Bm sets the text color and ESC[48;2;R;G;Bm the background, so ESC[38;2;255;105;180m is hot pink. It is undocumented and still reaching people, so readers without it lose the color. This generator sticks to the eight classic colors, which every desktop reader sees.
- Why is my Discord colored text showing up plain or as raw codes?
- Almost always a missing ESC character. Copying the visible part of an example, or retyping it, leaves out the invisible U+001B and Discord renders the block as plain monospace. The other common causes are tagging the block anything other than ansi, putting a space between the backticks and the word ansi, and using single backticks, which make inline code that never parses colors.
- Does Discord colored text work on mobile?
- Not reliably. Desktop and browser render ansi blocks in color. Reports from the iOS and Android apps conflict: some say color shows on recent versions, and others, as recently as late 2025, say the app renders the block with every color stripped. Assume phone readers may see plain monospace. The message itself is never broken; it just appears uncolored.
- Is colored text visible to everyone in the server?
- Everyone sees the same message, but not necessarily the same colors. Each reader's Discord theme decides the exact shade, and anyone whose app does not render ansi, which includes many phones, sees plain monospace text. Never rely on color alone to carry meaning.
For every other Discord syntax — bold, headers, subtext, spoilers, timestamps and masked links — see the Discord text formatting guide.