used another read-only Scintilla widget with a lexer that interpreted escapes and highlighted text accordingly
The `errorlist` lexer used for SciTE's output pane has some code for interpreting a limited set of ANSI escape sequences which is enabled with the `lexer.errorlist.escape.sequences` setting along with setting styles 23, 24, and 40 to 55 for the basic and intense colours. It isn't enough for more complex applications but shows colours for simple cases. The escape sequences are still there in the text as style 23 which is `notvisible`.
Here is grep with the `--color=always` option like `grep --color=always --line-number GdkAtom *.h` ![EscapeSeqELpng](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/225818/219923168-a0289156-cdc3-42c...)
Its not as useful as a real VTE.