I cannot understand why Apple’s default terminal has only 16 colors, iterm2 etc support 256 colors, but X11’s terminal supports true color (although its user interface is crappy).
My question is in two parts:
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Why, in this day and age, are terminals not able to support higher colors (i.e., higher than 16 and 256)?
The last time I asked this, I only got rude comments like "Why don’t you write one yourself"… I’m asking seriously, because I do not know about what goes into the internals of a terminal and why the constraint. Is it simply because there is no demand?
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If I’m wrong and there are good terminals that support true color, could you recommend them?
My observations are based on a Mac, but other platform answers are welcome too, because they might be helpful to others.
In the older days where terminals originate, they were hardware, and their colourfulness was limited by hardware constraints (i.e. memory shortage). Now we mostly use virtual terminals, which often emulate these older devices in software. So, one point is whether the software terminal actually emulates a device with its historical limitations.
Another point is that there are no conceptual limitations on colours, fonts or anything. This is because terminal is controlled by commands, which are simply special reserved sequences of characters. Commands are not standardized and differ from a terminal to a terminal. And that’s exactly why there are virtually no such exotic functions implemented, as it would leave the users with two limiting options:
The third point I’d notice is that such features are not really needed by majority of people.