how many colors can urxvt support?

[Marc Lehmann]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 01:13:36PM -0500, Angelina Carlton <brat at magma.ca> wrote:
> I have recently started using rxvt-unicode and really like some of the feature, like
> beautiful looking fonts without as much overhead on my system compared to gnome-terminal 
> for example.

rxvt-unicode no longer is configurable with respetc to number of colours,
and rxvt-unicode is now always in "88 colour mode" (which most apps
(including emacs, I think, but maybe you can prove me wrong) detect
automatically, do you use the correct TERM=rxvt-unicode setting?)

> and the colors are (I am assuming 8 regular weight, 8 bold?)
> color0 thru color15

Yes, and this stays the same (you better don't change them unless you know
what you are doing), plus 72 extra colours (which are well-known and the
same as other terminals with 88 colour mode such as xterm use).

You can only change these extra colours through escape sequences
currently.

> If I need to recompile the debian package to add something that is not 
> a problem but I dont know what to add.

No, as it is not configurable, it should be part of the debian package.

However, the debian patches out the correct terminfo entry for
rxvt-unicode, and fails to even install the terminfo file (it also
pointlessly patches the FAQ section where this is being pointed out), so
you might experience much better support if you start to use the correct
terminfo settings.

(Sigh, this gets asked often... I can't understand why debian prefers to
break packages instead of improving their rather bizarre rules that lead
to the removal of TERM=rxvt-unicode support in debian).

> I converted a jpeg to xpm and set it as the background and this
> was no problem, showing a picture with lots of colors didnt
> bother the terminal at all, so I am hoping it is some simple I need to

The colours for the background have no relation to the colours of the
text.  Even though 24-bit is supported for background/transparency etc.,
you cna only have 88 distinct text colours (and, vice versa, even though
only 88 colours are supported for text, more colours are supported for
backgrounds).

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