Question

When I run emacs -nw in an X terminal window, and I ask for M-x list-colors-display, I am offered a paltry palette:

black                                                      red     green   yellow  blue    magenta cyan    white   

I am told it is possible to get 265 colors. Setting the TERM environment variable to xterm-256color does not do the job. What does?

Answer 1

According to this you need ncurses-term library in addition to setting TERM to xterm-256color.

Okay, this has some other things to try like :

The xterm in Ubuntu Edgy does not advertise 256 color support by default.  To fix this you need to install a 256 color terminfo entry, and tell xterm to use it:      apt-get install ncurses-term     echo XTerm.termName: xterm-256color \       >>~/.Xdefaults     xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults 

and :

So you need a file term/screen-256color.el in your load-path.  Emacs 22 expects it to contain a terminal-init-screen defun.  Emacs 21 expects it to contain a bunch of top-level forms.  Here's what I use:      ;;; This is for GNU Emacs 22     (defun terminal-init-screen ()       'Terminal initialization function for screen.'       ;; Use the xterm color initialization code.       (load 'term/xterm')       (xterm-register-default-colors)       (tty-set-up-initial-frame-faces))      ;;; This is for GNU Emacs 21     (if (= 21 emacs-major-version)         (load 'term/xterm-256color'))  For Emacs 21, you also need to install the xterm-256color.el file from      http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/term/xterm-256color.el