Re: 256-color xterm

[Thomas Dickey <dickey@saltmine.radix.net>]

Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 01:02:07AM -0000, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>> Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 10:55:51PM -0000, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>> >> 
>> >> The XFree86 xterm supports ANSI color and VT220 emulation
>> >> There's an faq at
>> >> 	http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html
>> >> 	ftp://invisible-island.net/xterm/
>> >> 
>> 
>  > Not exactly (I don't make any of those packages, but frequently compile
>> xterm on systems where they're installed).  Looking at the stuff I've
>> installed, it appears that xlibs-dev and libxaw6-dev is what you need to
>> be able to do this.  So making a package shouldn't require anything more
>> (except of course the package-building-packages) than what I need to 
>> compile xterm.  After all, they're not incorporated into xterm's package.
>>

> ok, I went ahead and compiled/installed a 256-color xterm.  I was
> hoping that the extra colors would magically appear for me in xemacs,
> but emacs still thinks I have only 16 colors.  Also I tried running some of

That could be a termcap issue - emacs has to see the xterm-256color entry.
But I don't use emacs, and only know secondhand about the script it uses
for setting this up.

> the tests in vttests (um, I get the impression from the net that you
> wrote these, Thomas!) but the oly one that seemed to generate more

most of them - not the 256colors.pl (though I've made changes to it).

> than 16 colors was dynamic.sh.  256colors.pl, for instance, only shows
> the ANSI colors, not the 16x16 box or the grayscale ramp its supposed
> to.  Do I have to set some other variables somewhere (e.g., in
> .Xdefaults) to make sure xtemr understnads 256-colors?

No - the main thing here is whether your X server has enough colors available.
The 8-bit displays don't.  I've tested this mostly with 16-bit displays.
xterm has defaults for the color resources (compiled in), so that's normally
not a problem.  Otherwise, when color is enabled there's no additional
resources controlling whether the 256-colors are available.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net