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# Terminal sessions

Pygments support the parsing and highlighting of terminal sessions, like command-line shells, interactive consoles and language REPL.

They are typically command lines or code, mixed with generic output.

Examples for each can be found in the lexer documentation.

## Operating system shells

These lexers are expecting a prompt to identify user input. So to highlight a shell session, prefix your code snippet with a specially formatted prompt.

They are typically named `<shell> Session`.

## Interactive consoles

Similarly to systems shells, Pygments recognize a variety of interactive language sessions.

Their IDs typically follow the `<language>-console` or `<language>-repl` pattern.

## Generic output

To display standalone terminal output and keep styling consistent, you can use the generic `output` lexer.

## ANSI rendering

In all the lexers above, the command results are parsed as generic output. Which means they are rendered as-is, without any styling applied, for example by ANSI codes.

Here is a couple of third-party projects covering this use-case:

- pygments-ansi-color: implements a new lexer and formatter to parse and render pure ANSI content.

- Click Extra: adds ANSI-capable lexers for each language listed above.