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Asked: 2026-06-01T16:07:29+00:00

I have GNU Emacs 23 (package emacs23 ) installed on an Ubuntu 10.04 desktop

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I have GNU Emacs 23 (package emacs23) installed on an Ubuntu 10.04 desktop machine and package emacs23-nox installed on an Ubuntu 10.04 headless server (no X installed). Both installations have the same ~/.emacs file. I run Emacs with -nw on both computers. I don’t have python-mode installed on either machine as my understanding is that this is included in Emacs 23.

On the desktop machine, comments in Python (starting with #) are highlighted in red. On the server, comments appear in plain white text like all other non-highlighted text. Any suggestions as to why comments are not being highlighted correctly on the server (nox) installation?

Update: This appears to be a terminal-related issue. I ssh into the server machine from terminator via the screen replacement byobu. If I run emacs on the server with TERM="xterm-256color" emacs, then comments are highlighted, but all the other colours look very strange.

Update: Adding `export TERM=”xterm-256color” “solved” this. The syntax highlighting now has very strange colours though: purples lilacs and light browns. My green current line highlight bar is now a light pale yellow/green. Comments are highlighted in red though 🙂

Update: Solved. Setting TERM="xterm-color" produces “proper” colors, including highlighting of comments. The server was defaulting to a value of “screen-bce” for TERM which was not highlighting comments.

Update: Unsolved. byobu provides keybindings for various function keys to easily create new screen sessions and switch between them. When TERM is set to xterm-color, these function keys no longer work. So I guess I’ll just have to be happy with unhighlighted comments in Python code in Emacs.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For me running emacs -nw from inside byobu with TERM=xterm produced the correct colours for syntax highlighting (the comments in python and bash are all red not just the #) and the function keys work. Note I set TERM as part of an alias for running emacs rather than setting it generally in .bashrc:

    alias emacs='TERM=xterm; emacs -nw'

    See also this post: Terminal emacs colors only work with TERM=xterm-256color

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