How to Set Up My Linux X Terminal So That Emacs Has Access to 256 Colors

How do I set up my Linux X terminal so that Emacs has access to 256 colors?

According to this you need ncurses-term library in addition to setting TERM to xterm-256color.

Okay, this has some other things to try like :

The xterm in Ubuntu Edgy does not advertise 256 color support by
default.  To fix this you need to install a 256 color terminfo entry,
and tell xterm to use it:

    apt-get install ncurses-term
    echo XTerm.termName: xterm-256color \
      >>~/.Xdefaults
    xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

and :

So you need a file term/screen-256color.el in your load-path.  Emacs
22 expects it to contain a terminal-init-screen defun.  Emacs 21
expects it to contain a bunch of top-level forms.  Here's what I use:

    ;;; This is for GNU Emacs 22
    (defun terminal-init-screen ()
      "Terminal initialization function for screen."
      ;; Use the xterm color initialization code.
      (load "term/xterm")
      (xterm-register-default-colors)
      (tty-set-up-initial-frame-faces))

    ;;; This is for GNU Emacs 21
    (if (= 21 emacs-major-version)
        (load "term/xterm-256color"))

For Emacs 21, you also need to install the xterm-256color.el file from

    http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/term/xterm-256color.el

Emacs/xterm color annoyance on Linux

The color brightwhite looks ok on my Emacs (which is running under a terminal, not X). On RHEL5 I have my TERM environment variable set to xterm-256color. If it's working correctly, you should be able to run these scripts and see 256-color output. Under Emacs, you should see a reasonably smooth color ramp (no obviously duplicated colors) when you do M-x list-colors-display. If not, you are probably missing the right termcap entry (try installing the libtermcap-devel package, I think).

If I change TERM to xterm-color, then brightwhite comes out a bit gray in the output of list-colors-display.

I'm not sure about RHEL4.

Why is the super simple fuction not displaying 256 colors in my Mac terminal?

Try using printf instead:

for code in {0..255}; do printf "\e[38;05;${code}m $code: Test"; done

Running GNU Screen with 256 colors on OS X Lion

By default, screen is not aware that it is running in a 256-color-capable xterm. To make programs in screen recognize this feature, you need to set a couple of things in your ~/.screenrc:

term "screen-256color"
# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I" 
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground 
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm' 
# erase background with current bg color 
defbce "on" 

If this doesn’t work for you, your version of screen probably wasn’t compiled with ./configure --enable-colors256. You can check this in the welcome screen when starting screen. The default version that comes with OS X doesn’t support 256 colors. You could check out the source and compile your own version, putting the resulting binary in your $PATH (I put it in ~/bin which I added to my $PATH):

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/screen.git
cd screen/src
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-colors256
make   # I got a lot of warnings here, but they don't seem to matter
sudo make install
cp screen ~/bin/screen

Sources: 1 and 2

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