Because currently coloring is achieved by inserting terminal codes that Windows console does not support and displays simply as weird characters.

Outputting colored text can be achieved using two methods:

1) previous = GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo() -> SetConsoleTextAttribute(color) -> output text -> SetConsoleTextAttribute (previous)

This requires locking, otherwise multithreaded output will be a mess (more so than it already is)

2) WriteConsoleOutput()

This modifies console buffer directly and writes rectangular blocks into rectangular buffer space (no built-in line wrapping support).


GStreamer uses (1).

Another thing of note: it might be desirable to be able to force glib to do coloring using terminal codes. This is useful when piping the output to `less' or other programs that *do* understand these codes.