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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice, if they will merge patches [1] for truecolor (16M colors) support in their console incarnation of emacs. Both Vim [2] and Neovim [3] already did this. Since most terminal emulators now support this mode [4], that will improve syntax highlighting and theme customizing to a new level.

[1] http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-su...

[2] https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f...

[3] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5d...

[4] https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

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By framing this is a matter of patches getting merged, you imply that there is nothing else in the way. In fact, there is no proper terminfo support for true color[1], nor even a standard, canonical way to detect true color support. All that exists now is an encoding convention which has promising adoption but which is by no means uncontroversial[2]. When you couple the portability issue with the increased memory footprint and the lack of a clear and compelling use-case, it is not surprising that this is not a priority for emacs developers.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2013-10/msg00...

[2] http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/rxvt-unicode/2013q3/001834...

I wish it could be suppported by terminfo, but as long as its developer reject to do any work to extent terminfo to support truecolor, I'll promote this standard without dependency from terminfo. Also, speaking about 'modern' mechanism he means to use 'ncurses', but as you can see, a lot of console programs prefer not to use this library.

You can add console-terminal-emulator in the nosh toolset to the list. It's had this since its first version.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

Its manual page (herewith a slightly outdated version) calls out the ISO/IEC 8613-6 parameter separator problem in its section on differences from real terminals and documented standards.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

Even worse is running a terminal inside of emacs. ansi-term can only display 8 colors, even though the editor it's running in can support (at least) 256. As someone who runs a large percentage of their shells inside of emacs, this is a particular annoyance, especially because presumably adding in the remaining colors would be a trivial task for someone familiar with the code.

I used to be bothered by this, and then I realized for every thing I wanted to do in the terminal, 5 minutes of searching would usually find a superior UI to do the same task in an Emacs-native way that I could effortlessly customize, rebind keys, add hooks for, and rewrite functionality live. About the only exception I can think for this is htop; M-x proced does most of the same things but doesn't look as nice doing it.

http://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color

+1 for this. It's basically impossible to get emacs colors to work correctly in the terminal.

And as soon as you complain you are confronted with "emacs is supposed to be run with the graphical interface, just install it with the gui and don't use -nw (no window) option"... yeah, right... no thanks.

Nobody says that.

But don't complain, better submit a patch. Or help ironing out the one linked above, it's unfinished.

I am not saying it's an official stance or such, not saying you are someone who would say that, but don't tell me "nobody says that" when that was what I got multiple times from emacs users.

If I hadn't then why would I say so?

All right. It's not an official stance, and a lot of users are know prefer using Emacs in a terminal (not myself, though). But some others might say that.

But what use is there to complain to them? None of them sound to be anywhere close to the Emacs development.

I actually say that :)

I just think the graphical Emacs provides the most comfortable environment. It displays images (and thus also PDF files or a graphical browser widget), doesn't swallow the Alt key by default, has prettier colours, and you still get to edit remote files with TRAMP.

This doesn't mean that Emacs in a terminal should not be improved. I sometimes use it when I ssh into my workstation from a machine that doesn't have Emacs installed.

Exactly. This is one of the main reasons why I encourage admins and developers to try Vi(m): There will always be a vi or vim installed wherever you SSH to, and you will be able to work comfortably on the terminal.

Weird; I've never needed to do anything more than "export TERM=xterm-256colors" provided I was using a high-color terminal emulator to begin with.

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