Emacs doesn't want to support 256 colors in terminal window

[Paul B. Mahol]

On 2/27/09, Grzegorz Junka <cv at gjunka.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I hope someone will be able to help with this. I've already checked all
> resources I could google but still can't get it to work. Basically my
> terminal can show more than 16 colors but emacs doesn't want to use
> these colors.
>
> I run FreeBSD (7.1-RELEASE) as a virtual machine and use it without any
> X interface, only through ssh from a Windows machine (the host). I have
> set up both putty and ssh in cygwin to report term type as
> 'xterm-256color' (putty in the configuration window and xterm using -tn
> command line parameter).
>
> That part works fine because I can run scripts available on the internet
> (256colors2.pl, colortest), which surely show more than 8 colors in my
> terminal window. The problem is when I run emacs and type: M-x
> list-colors-display. Emacs shows only boring 8 colors (not even 16).
>
> A bit about my configuration. Emacs was compiled without X11 support
> (from ports emacs-nox11-22.3). I also don't have xterm installed. I
> tried to set env variable TERM=xterm-256color but it didn't help. There
> is a special note about using terms in emacs in
> "/usr/local/share/emacs/22.3/lisp/term/README" I unpacked xterm.el.gz
> from that folder and tried to supply it as term/xterm-256color.el or
> term/xterm.el to emacs, but that also didn't work.
>
> It is interesting to note, that when I type: tput color I get different
> values depending on the user and terminal:
>
> user grzesiu, putty, TERM=xterm-256color, tput colors: 114
> the same user, putty and TERM value, but tput colors: 123, another trial
> and output is 80
> user root, putty, TERM=xterm, tput colors: 184
> the same user and putty, but TERM=xterm-256color, tput colors: 115
> user grzesiu, ssh from cygwin, TERM=xterm-256color, tput colors: 139
>
> I don't understand these values because when I run these scripts above I
> don't see any difference in colors shown (subjectively). In neither of
> these configurations emacs show more than 8 colors. Any ideas or
> suggestions greatly appreciated.

This looks like emacs problem. Are you sure that emacs was compiled
with 256 color support? (at least I know that elinks can be configured
to support 88 and/or 256 and/or real colors)
Also is there some kind of termcap option in emacs to be changed/read?
I dont use emacs but in vim:
:set t_Co=256
will show 256 colors if terminal supports it.
Actually if t_Co termcap setting is N, vim will not try to show more
than N colors even if terminal supports X(>N) colors.

-- 
Paul