vefatica is right in that something has changed in v20 regarding ANSI (probably directly related to adding general ANSI support for all console windows). But I think Rex is definitely right in how it works (and how it should work) in v20. I remember playing around with ANSI sequences back in the days of MS-DOS v6 (with ANSI.SYS loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file) and with calling BBS's and using ANSI terminal emulation with almost all my BBS connections, and I remember that anytime I used an ESC character (ASCII 27) followed by a character that isn't recognized by ANSI.SYS (like when putting only an ESC character and then other text, where the following character is very likely not to be recognized as part of a valid ANSI sequence), then upon displaying it on the screen (e.g. putting it in a text file and then later doing TYPE TEXTFILE.TXT), the ESC character would be discarded, and I think the following character was discarded as well. This is always the case as far as I remember. Since Rex says that the previous versions of TCC didn't directly support ANSI except for just a subset, I'm guessing that displaying them on screen as a result of certain commands like ALIAS didn't cause them to be interpreted (if it was in one of the aliases that displayed on the screen), but they would be interpreted as a result of other commands like ECHO and TYPE that display to the screen. Now that there seems to be (more or less) nearly full ANSI support, the ANSI sequences seem to be interpreted anytime they are displayed on the screen by any command (either just in TCC or in all console apps, depending on settings), and like I say, I think this is the way it's supposed to be, which again was the way it worked back in the old DOS days. I tested the alias though, and it seems to execute properly, even though it doesn't display on the screen the way you'd expect it to. If you want to see it when displaying aliases on screen, and assuming you're loading all your aliases on startup from a file, you can always add the alias directly to the file instead of adding it at the command line (and assuming you're using "^e" instead of trying to directly enter the ESC character). Then when you display aliases on the screen, you'll actually see the "^e" in the alias instead of either the ASCII 27 character or the character not appearing at all.