oragono/docs/MOTDFORMATTING.md

MOTD Formatting Codes

If motd-formatting is enabled in the config file, you can use special escape codes to easily get bold, coloured, italic, and other types of specially-formatted text.

Our formatting character is ‘$’, and this followed by specific letters means that the text after it is formatted in the given way. Here are the character pairs and what they output:

--------------------------
 Escape | Output
--------------------------
   $$   | Dollar sign ($)
   $b   | Bold
   $c   | Color code
   $i   | Italics
   $u   | Underscore
   $r   | Reset
--------------------------

Color codes

After the color code ($c), you can use square brackets to specify which foreground and background colors to output. For example:

This line outputs red text:

`This is $c[red]really cool text!`

This line outputs red text with a light blue background:

`This is $c[red,light blue]22% cooler!`

If you’re familiar with IRC colors you can also use the raw numbers you’re used to:

`This is $c13pink text`

Here are the color names we support, and which IRC colors they map to:

--------------------
 Code | Name
--------------------
  00  | white
  01  | black
  02  | blue
  03  | green
  04  | red
  05  | brown
  06  | magenta
  07  | orange
  08  | yellow
  09  | light green
  10  | cyan
  11  | light cyan
  12  | light blue
  13  | pink
  14  | grey
  15  | light grey
--------------------

In addition, some newer clients can make use of the colour codes 16-98, though they don’t have any names assigned. Take a look at this table to see which colours these numbers are: https://modern.ircdocs.horse/formatting.html#colors-16-98