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2.1.1 Terminal emulator programs ¶

The following terminal emulator programs support 256 colors and set TERM=xterm-256color accordingly:

• In GNOME: gnome-terminal, tilda.
• rxvt-unicode (sets TERM=rxvt-unicode-256color).
• st (sets TERM=st-256color).
• QTerminal.
• On macOS: Terminal, iTerm2.

The following terminal emulator programs support 256 colors. You only need to set TERM=xterm-256color or similar; the programs by default set TERM to a value that supports only 8 colors.

• xterm is in many cases built with support for 256 colors. But it sets TERM=xterm. You need to set TERM=xterm-256color.
• In GNOME: guake (sets TERM=xterm). You need to set TERM=xterm-256color.
• In KDE: konsole (sets TERM=xterm). You need to set TERM=xterm-256color or TERM=konsole-256color.
• In KDE: yakuake (sets TERM=xterm). You need to set TERM=xterm-256color.
• In Enlightenment: Eterm (sets TERM=Eterm). You need to set TERM=Eterm-256color.
• mlterm (sets TERM=mlterm). You need to set TERM=mlterm-256color.
• On Windows: PuTTY (sets TERM=xterm). You need to set TERM=xterm-256color or TERM=putty-256color.
• On Windows: TeraTerm (sets TERM=xterm). You need to set TERM=xterm-256color.

A couple of terminal emulator programs support even the entire RGB color space (16 million colors). To get this to work, at this date (2019), you need three things:

• The ncurses library version 6.1 or newer must be installed.
• You need a recent version of the respective terminal emulator program. See https://github.com/termstandard/colors for the most recent developments in this area.
• You need to set the TERM environment variable to the corresponding value: TERM=xterm-direct instead of TERM=xterm or TERM=xterm-256color, TERM=konsole-direct in konsole, TERM=st-direct in st, TERM=mlterm-direct in mlterm, or TERM=iterm2-direct in iTerm2 on macOS.