Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "D. Ebling" <d.ebling8@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2018 20:15:26 -0300
>>
>>        Emacs on st detects 8 colors support, and st supports 256 and
>> 24-bits colors. Opening a file with "TERM=xterm-256colors emacs -q -nw
>> foo.bar" or using "(add-to-list 'term-file-aliases '("st-256color"
>> . "xterm"))" resolves the colors issue but introduces a 5 seconds delay
>> to load the file, if i open like this and after use only "emacs -q -nw
>> foo.bar" the 256 colors work and there's no delay to load the file, but
>> this only works if i used "TERM=xterm-256color" before.  st version is 0.8.1.
>
> I think this requires a new st.el file in the lisp/term/ directory,
> which will tell Emacs that st handles 256 colors, but not the extended
> xterm commands (whose queries I'm guessing are the reason for the
> delay).
>
> Patches welcome.

I couldn't reproduce the issue with the delay neither on st version
0.8.1 or 0.8.2.

In any case, I took a simplistic stab at this.  I can now run
"emacs -Q -nw" without specifying term and I get 256 colors as shown
by M-x list-colors-display.

Could you test it and see if it works for you?  You didn't mention
which version of Emacs you're using, but I would recommend to test
this on the current master branch (the development version 27.0.50).

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas