Making 256 color Xterm support the default.
Most display's now are 16 or 24 bit. While with 8-bit displays, it makes
sense to minimize the number of colors that an xterm ANSI terminal uses,
that reasoning doesn't apply anymore.
The 256-color xterm gives:
8 Standard ansi colors
8 Bright ansi colors
24 Level greyscale ramp
216 6x6x6 colorcube.
See [4] for the xterm control sequences. This information is also in the
new xterm manpage [5]. Enabling it requires making a #define when
compiling XFree86.
So, unless there are a signifigant number of users who are limited to
8-bit displays, I propose that we consider making 256-color xterms the
default.
A lot of software could be made a lot more pleasant to use with the
additional colors. Everything from angband/nethack to colorized 'ls',
xemacs, lynx, bash. Almost every major program in linux runs through
X-term and could gain a lot more flexibility in color schemes through this
extension.
I can definitely say that Tinyfugue is a joy to use with this extension.
16 colors are not enough. I've not yet altered /etc/DIR_COLORS, but I plan
to.
A websearch and dejanews search do not bring up any discussion on this
topic. It does indicate that there are a few programs which have had
patches made to support this functionality. (Bashish [1], mutt [2],
tinyfugue [3])
I wish to start a discussion and see what people think.
Scott
[1] http://info.ccone.at/NEWS/msg00418.html
[2] http://www.egroups.com/message/mutt-dev/4087
[3] Custom patches for which the maintainer has never responded to my
request for inclusion.
[4] http://www.uni-ulm.de/~s_smasch/X11/ctlseqs.txt
[5] http://xfree86.desiato.de/xfree86/4.0.1/xterm.1.html
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