Re: emacs -nw, xterm and 256 colors [solved]

[Martin Karlsson <qsvans@gmail.com>]

Leo wrote:

> That looks awesome. What specifically did you do to get there?

First off, most of the following explanation is me guessing, not hard
facts.

Secondly, since you're on Linux, I'm guessing your system favours
terminfo over termcap. I'm using FreeBSD, which unfortunately seems to
rely more on (the older) termcap.

In short, my terminfo.db has a valid xterm-256color entry (which I
believe is ignored by many apps), and has termcap.db entries which map
all xterms with more tha 8 colours to an xterm TERM *with* 8 colours.

In other words, when i set my TERM to xterm-256color, xterm happily
obliges since it looks in terminfo. That only gives the actual xterm
access to all those nice colours though.

Some other apps (including emacs), [again this is on FreeBSD -- may or
may not apply to linuxen] use termcap, and conlude that my xterm is only
capable of displaying 8 colours.

Having said that, the full story (meager and potentially wildly
dangerous as it may be) can be found at:
<http://martink.freeshell.net/emacs/emacs-256xterm.txt>

Good luck,
-- 
Martin Karlsson