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I Just Wanted Emacs to Look Nice — Using 24-Bit Color in Terminals (chadaustin.me)
submitted 7 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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TL;DR: Explanation of why the escape sequence for 256 color and 24 bit color modes are weird and can vary. \E[38:5:​_n_​m is technically the correct form for 256 color, but \E[38;5;​_n_​m is the form terminals more widely support.

I saw this on Hacker News today, and found the article interesting because I'd recently seen a Terminal Guide page on 256 color that mentioned how terminals support different versions of the codes (with semicolons being the most compatible). Semi-relatedly there's XTerm's criticism of Gnome Terminal and VTE (which is talks about compatibility in general).

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[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 8 points 7 months ago

I could feel my grey beard growing long as I read that.

[-] tesseract@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago

If you're using emacs, stick to the GUI unless you have good reasons not to. The GUI is more or less a smart terminal. You're missing out on a lot of features if you opt for the terminal.

this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
27 points (100.0% liked)

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