The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H. P. Lovecraft
256 color terminals

While the rest of the techworld is getting excited about their aero, quartz or compiz 32bit color 3D desktop, I reached a less impressive milestone today:

From now on I use a 256 color terminal ;-). Actually I looked into this earlier, but since gnome-terminal and screen didn't support it back then (maybe upstream, but not in my distro), I enabled support just today.

Excellent documentation on this topic is already available on multiple places, but to summarize for myself:

.screenrc 
attrcolor b ".I"
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
defbce "on" 
startup_message off

.bash_profile 
set TERM xterm-256color; export TERM

.vimrc 
set t_Co=256 
colorscheme=asudark

For vim you need a special colorscheme (gvim colorschemes do not work). My vim hacked 256 colors scheme, which work better with a transparent background then the original, is available here.

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Posted by jochem on 2008-09-26, last update on 2008-09-26