Strange escape sequences in terminal

Question

I have kitty, and I use nnn as file manager. I actiavted the "preview-tui" plugin in nnn. When I hover over a folder, I see something like this:

What are those strange escape sequences?

Answer 1

The <ESC>[...m escapes are color codes. It looks like you're looking at the output with less (or the tools are running less for you).

less can be made to display the colors with the -R option. I.e. less -R, or set the LESS environment variable to include R (among any other options you need). You can get similar issues with git, if you have the LESS envvar set, but without including -R.