How to prevent pieces of colored text in the command line turning back white using std::wcout?

Question

I recently got back into C++ and this is just beyond me. This cmd app, when compiled using the debugger in VS2022, looks perfectly as it should. However, when I run the compiled project executable, a seemingly random piece of text often changes its color to the default white.

It's obviously not noticeable when it happens with white text, but I intend to use SetConsoleTextAttribute (or any other way to print colored text) in my program, as well as Unicode support, which _getline does just fine.

It appears to be caused by wcout, as removing _setline and changing them back to the narrow type fixed the issue. However, just removing _setline doesn't do anything.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <Windows.h>
#include <io.h>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    
    HANDLE hConsole = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);

    fflush(stdout);
    (void)_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);

    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 10);
    
    wcout << L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n";
    wcout << L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n";
    
    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 11);

    wcout << L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n";
    wcout << L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n";

    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 12);

    wcout << L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n";
    wcout << L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n";

    cin.get();
}

EDIT: Using wmain instead of main and calling fflush wherever it made the tiniest bit of sense didn't fix anything either. Weird.

Answer 1

I seem to have fixed it, Using wmain instead of _setline. setting locale to "" at the beginning and flushing stdout before main returns 0 makes the problem disappear with Unicode still being supported.

Like this:

#include <iostream>
#include <locale>
#include <Windows.h>

using namespace std;

int wmain() {
    
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
    HANDLE hConsole = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);

    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 10);
    
    wprintf(L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n");
    wprintf(L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n");
    
    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 11);

    wprintf(L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n");
    wprintf(L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n");

    SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole, 12);

    wprintf(L"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,\n");
    wprintf(L"sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.\n");

    cin.get();
}