True Color support in various terminals and applications

Some things I can think of:

- Themes, its nice to have the same color scheme across your programs. You can always redefine your 16 base colors in the terminal and map these to syntax in your terminal program (e.g. vi), but it's cleaner to have the rgb colors directly in your theme file, especially if you switch themes (I don't do it too often, but I like to change colors every month or so to keep it looking fresh)

- If you code CSS, it would be nice to have preview of #336699 colors in your editor. To implement that, you need real color support.

- And, less important, for those who play nethack-style games it's probably nice.

Recently, I set a background color for the 80th column in Vim. The gray nearest to the default bg color wasn't as subtle as I'd have liked.

Because my fave 256 aren't the same as yours, and palette switching is a huge pain. see for example what a pain it is to get Solarized working across both terminal and X and ssh sessions, in vim and emacs.

Image previews in Ranger. http://ranger.nongnu.org

Read ECMA-48¹, which is the free (as in beer) printing of the ‘ANSI’ terminal controls standard. If you want to supply text (like a file name), you'd probably use an OSC command ESC ] Ps ; Pt ST with a Ps that no one else is using. To mark the start and end of a region, you'd probably use a pair of control sequences (CSI) analogous to START / END OF SELECTED AREA, from a private use range.

(The true-color sequence comes from an ITU recommended extension / future version, T.416². It would be interesting for the OP site to list which terminals support the full proposal, including CMY an CMYK specifications, as well as RGB.)

¹ http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ² http://handle.itu.int/11.1002/1000/2546-en?locatt=format:pdf

Some terminals already detect URLs by pattern and make them clickable. You could also add an escape sequence to create the annotation you describe, then modify a terminal app to support the sequence. However, terminals don't always display trusted data, so it's very risky to add escape sequences that do anything more than display formatted text.

For example, there are sequences defined to change the title of the terminal window or print to a printer, but they are frequently disabled or left unsupported for security reasons.

It's only in the nightly builds

Terribly useful to me. For one, I can have vim themes that match my other styles in other programs.

(Not to mention we should have drawing support implemented IN the terminal by now).

Sarcasm? I find it sometimes hard to tell around here.

But seriously, I like the meta-idea of putting up a site to promote a technology; with a list of compliant apps for users, and information how to implement it for the developers. I'm thinking about making a site that catalogues DPI aware software for windows (like Macs "Retina"), because its annoying how many programs don't support high DPI screens properly, and its notoriously hard to do for developers.