How to Change the Text Color in Discord

One thing that Discord doesn’t support particularly well is a vibrant and colorful text chat experience. There’s text chat, but there are no built-in color commands and, at first glance, no way to do anything “fancy” with your text. Plain text can get very annoying very quickly, but in fact, there are ways to change your text color.

This article shows you how to get bold colors in your Discord text chats to make them more exciting and eye-catching for you and your friends alike!

How Discord Text Colorization Works

The key to colorizing text in Discord lies in the fact that Javascript is used to build the interfaces, along with a theme known as Solarized Dark and a library called highlight.js. When you log in to your Discord server, the page you see gets rendered by a series of rather sophisticated Javascript programs, including highlight.js.

Although the native Discord user interface provides no support for colorizing your text, the underlying Javascript engine, running the highlight.js script, does. By inserting what amounts to snippets of code into your text chat, you can change the color of the words printed out in everyone’s text chat window.

The basic concept to understand is that to change the color of a given piece of text, you need to encapsulate that text in a block of code. This procedure is a three-line block of text with your text as the middle block.

Using the “Back Quote” Symbol

To color code any text in Discord, you’ll need to use the backquote symbol (grave accent) located in the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard. It accompanies the Tilde symbol:

Write the first line of code

The first line of the code block should be three backquote symbols (“`), followed by the code phrase that tells the Solarized Dark theme what color to display. It should look like this:

Note: “CSS” may change to something like “Tex” or another phrase depending on your desired output. We’ll cover that below.

Type the second line

The second line needs to be your text typed out as you usually would. Hold Shift + Enter to create a new line. Clicking the Enter button alone sends the message.

Type your third line

The third line of the code block should be three more backquotes. This line rarely changes regardless of what outcome you’re expecting, and it should look like this:

Because we used “` CSS, your text should appear like this:

Inputting Your Text

There are two basic ways to enter text. The first way is to have a text file on your computer with the various codes for the different text colors you can access in this fashion and cut and paste the segments you want to use.

Another way is to enter the code block directly into the Discord chat engine, line by line. Type one line then hit Shift + Enter to create another line without sending the message to Discord. Type the second line and hit Shift + Enter again. Then type the third line and hit Enter to send it to Discord.

There are some limitations to this method. First, you have to do it for every line of text you want to colorize—you can’t just turn color on or off. Second, your text appears in a box on the Discord server.

Your Color Options

The highlight.js codes give access to seven new colors in addition to the default grey. Once you get these down, the markdown codes make a lot of sense, don’t be afraid to play around and try to find new ones.

Here are the codes and samples of their appearance.

Plain grey (but in a box)

“`Sample Text“`

Green (sort of)

“`diff

+This text is going to be great!

“`

When you add ‘+‘ before your text, the color changes to green. You can also type “!” at the beginning of the second line if it’s easier to reach.

You can also use this one:

“`json

“Sample text”

“`

Remember, json won’t work without quotation marks before your text in the middle line.

Cyan

“`yaml

Sample text

“`

Yellow

“`http

Sample text

“`

Orange

“`arm

Sample_text

“`

You will need to add the underscore (or a period) between each word for the entire message to turn orange. Otherwise, only the first word will be orange.

Red

“`diff

-Sample Text

“`

You can also get red by doing this:

“`css

[Sample Text]

“`

Yellowish?

There are a couple of ways to get Yellow text. The first is pretty reliable, while the second method highlights only some words.

“`fix

This is a new Message

“`

“`elm

Sample_text_Goes_here

“`

Notice that the elm command only highlights words that begin with capital letters. But, you can also add an underscore between each word to change the entire message to yellow.

Blue

“`ini

[This text will be blue]

“`

Another way to get blue text is using the CSS method with dashes. It should look like this:

“`css

.sample-text-goes-here

“`

Be sure to put the period before the text as shown above.

Advanced Techniques

There are other ways to get colored text using the same basic technique, but they are more advanced. All of this works (sort of) because these formats get used to display code blocks when a developer writes a program.

The first text after the “` tells highlight.js which scripting language it should be formatting, and there are some straightforward ways to cast colors directly in a line.

Here are some of the languages you can use and the ways to force color. Experiment with them, and you’ll soon find yourself writing colorful text messages all the time.

You can even use various brackets to achieve the looks you want. Disappointed by your blue options? Try this:

Then there’s this nifty trick for color-coding texts:

Lastly, you can also use “`tex to create some pretty colorful messages. Try different symbols to make your text look different:

For more information, check out Highlight.js.org or join the Discord server Discord Highlight.js.

Discord Bots

There are a lot of Discord Bots available that offer to change specific colors on your server—many of these update the colors of roles but not text. Based on our research, there aren’t any bots that will make changing the color of your text simpler.

For even more advanced users, Discord also allows you to add embeds and webhooks as messages. These get used to display colored blocks and also support markdown text. You can see just how this feature works by heading over to Discord Webhook.

Other Text Customization Options

There are more options for you to play around with your text on Discord.

Bold – **This is Bold**

Italics – *This is Italicized*

Bold & Italicized – *** This is Bold and Italicized*** (Kind makes sense, doesn’t it?)

Underlined – _This makes Underlined text_

Strikethrough- ~~This is strike-through text~~

The more you get to know Discord, the more there is to learn. Play around with these options, and you’ll soon realize you can do more like __*** underlined, bold, and italicized***__ text. Once you’ve become an expert, you may want to show others how to make these customizations. If that’s the case, just put a backslash between the content like *Italicized*.

Frequently Asked Questions

This section includes more answers to your frequently asked questions.

What can I do if some of these aren’t working?

Based on our tests in May of 2022, we saw more success using the above-listed markdowns on the Discord desktop app than on the web client. If you’re having trouble with these codes, try the app instead. As we mentioned above, some of these methods work better than others, regardless of which Discord version you use. Overall, they are pretty reliable.

Is there a bot for Discord that can color text?

Absolutely! A simple online search will pull up quite a few bots that can change the color of your text in Discord. Perform a broad search and review the ones that best fit your needs. Check the reviews and the capabilities of each bot and add them to your server.

These aren’t working for me. What else can I do?

The more common reason the examples above aren’t working for our readers is that Discord only recognizes the backtick, not quotation marks. In the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard, you will see the backtick key with the tilde option above it. Use that key instead of the quotation marks.