Re: Emacs 256 color support.

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 04:43:49AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Well, that did it, I think. I had gone under the assumption that the
>     termcap info was correct, but in fact it wasn't. I converted the
>     terminfo file supplied by the xterm distro into a termcap file and
>     used the xterm-256color entry. Perhaps in the next xterm release, the
>     terminfo file could be tic'd for those of us still using termcap?
> 
> Can someone prepare a note for etc/PROBLEMS to tell users what to do?

He tried using the termcap entry for xterm-256color.  Since the full
entry would be larger than 1023 bytes, color support (and some function
keys) are normally omitted.  But for the case of GNU termcap, one can
derive a more useful termcap entry directly from the terminfo database,
e.g.,

        infocmp -CrTt xterm-256color

(1753 bytes).

The termcap file distributed with xterm can't make that assumption, so it
follows the 1023-byte limit.  I will improve xterm's termcap since it does
provide strings for ANSI colors in the base entry used by xterm-256color - but
different strings of about the same length would be used for the 256-color
model.

The fix one needs for etc/PROBLEMS is to add these strings to the termcap entry
if they aren't present:

        :AB=\E[48;5;%dm:\
        :AF=\E[38;5;%dm:\

(line-breaks are given to make it clearer - one normally saves a couple of
bytes by not using them)

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