Also, disable the formatting if stdout is not a terminal. That way, your colors and cursor movements won't be visible when piping to another program, and your tool will be usable in apps that don't understand the CSI and chars that follow. Use a command-line switch with more than two states, e.g., `ls` (and probably other GNU tools) has `--color=always|auto|never` which covers most use cases.

Also not mentioned in the article: there are a few syntaxes available for specifying things in control sequences, like

    \x1b[38;2;{r};{g};{b}m