OSDev.org

I am writing a new kernel using C. Can anyone tell me how to insert line breaks? I have been using "\n" but it always showed up as wierd characters on the screen.

Oh yeah, I heard somewhere that you could use ANSI escape sequences... How do you type the escape character in WinXP??

Everything is up to you...you have to define and write your printf() function which handles line breaks ('\n') and other functions...

Sorry for being so dense... but how do you make your own printf()? I looked inside the stdio.h file but couldn't find anything useful...

You're probably part-way there if you've got something to show up on screen. You should be keeping track of the row and column where the next character is to be outputted; when you see a '\n' in the string, set the row and column to point to the start of the next line.

Regarding escape sequences: again, they'll only be supported if you write code to handle them. You don't need to type the escape character (in fact, you can't); use the '\x1B' sequence.

Hello!
The best methode to see how escape sequences lokk like is to open your (compiled) kernel-file in a hex editor. There you can see how the compiler translated the escape sequences. Then you can write a print-function that takes care of these ascii-codes and threat them right (line-break, tab-stop, PC-Speaker-Beep, ...).
Start with a simple print-function that only can print strings. Later you can write a printf-function that although converts integers to string.

Thanks Tim Robinson and Richie for the help!