Description
Throughout the years, 24-bit true color support has been asked about in #weechat but no issue exists about it.
General resources about terminal 24-bit true color support:
Issues
WeeChat relies on ncurses to handle the terminal and ncurses relies on terminfo to produce the right escapes. According to the true color gist, ncurses 6.1 supposedly supports it but practically it doesn't seem like it, which is likely why there's exactly zero documentation, tutorials or examples about it.
The current possibilities seem to be:
-
Use a
-directTERM, e.g.xterm-direct.
In this terminfo, the 16M colors are simply encoded sequentially into the standard terminal color numbering and terminfo conditionally uses the 24-bit color escape instead. Technically this should allow using them through ncurses just under color numbers including above 255 (I didn't actually test this).However, the extended numbering is inconsistent and plain stupid. Increasing terminal color extensions provide the following:
xtermhas: 8 basic colors + 8 bright colors.xterm-256colorhas: 8 basic colors + 8 bright colors + 216 color cube + 24 grayscale colors.xterm-directhas: 8 basic colors + 16M true colors.
While
xterm-256coloris backwards compatible withxterm(it keeps all the original colors and just adds new ones),xterm-directis incompatible with bothxterm-256colorandxtermbecause it removes the bright colors, color cube and grayscale colors and replaces them with the beginning of true colors. Technically it works, but it's incredibly stupid on terminfo's part: any application that previously used bright colors or 256 colors extension will just show them as (almost) blacks in the true color scheme. This is so annoying that it's hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to usexterm-directbecause it makes every terminal program that isn't 24-bit color compatible but uses more than the basic 8 colors unusable and ugly.This has also been a major point brought up in the gist discussion. In a sensible world
xterm-directwould have: 8 basic colors + 8 bright colors + 216 color cube + 24 grayscale colors + 16M true colors. It's yet to be seen if and in how many years this gets improved to make any sense. -
Use terminal palette modification (via
can_change_colorandinit_color).
Ncurses has even before had the commands to modify RGB values of the 256-color palette in the (possibly rare) cases where it actually is supported. This just means that the existing standard 256-color palette would be replaced with some other colors but that's far from ideal:- Redefining a color means that the standard color of that color number isn't usable anymore and would also suddenly change.
- Still limited by 256 different colors in the palette.
- WeeChat would have to, in addition to the color pairs table, also manage a colors table to track which colors have been redefined to which RGB values and use them correctly.
- Changing the palette has nothing to do with the actual 24-bit color escapes even (?).
WeeChat changes
If there's a solution to the above issues, then WeeChat would still require some changes to make it usable:
- Optimize color (pair) storage.
- Allow many more colors in WeeChat's own color codes.
- Allow RGB colors in options (Add support for hex color codes as values in options. #312).