No terminfo support? I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but I wish people wouldn't hardcode terminal escape codes. Considering zig's good interop with C, wiring up a call to tigetstr().

It's also important not to emit escape codes at all when TERM=dumb. (You'll get this behavior automatically if you implement color support by asking terminfo to the escape codes.)

    const c = @cImport({
        @cInclude("ncurses.h");
        @cInclude("term.h");
    });

    pub fn main() !void {
        // Initialize terminfo
        _ = c.setupterm(null, 1, null);

        // Get capability strings
        const setaf = c.tigetstr("setaf");  // set foreground
        const setab = c.tigetstr("setab");  // set background
        const sgr0 = c.tigetstr("sgr0");    // reset

        // Parameterize for red foreground
        const red = c.tparm(setaf, c.COLOR_RED, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);

        // Use it
        _ = c.printf("%sThis is red%s\n", red, sgr0);
    }