Appearance
Italic (SGR 3)
ESC [ 3 mSGR 3 renders text in italic style. The sequence is
ESC [ 3 m. Reset with SGR 23. Italic requires the terminal font to have an italic variant — monospace fonts without italics typically render it as normal text or with a slight color change.
Italic was not supported on early hardware terminals and was historically rendered as inverse video on some systems. Modern terminals with proper font support render true italics, commonly used for comments, emphasis, and documentation in TUI applications and syntax-highlighted output.How this is testedautomated
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\x1b[3mX, verify the cell at (0,0) has italic=true.The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-04-06
Supported by 13 of 14 backends (93%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |