From: "Marco van Hulten" Subject: Re: rxvt-unicode: 256 vs 80 colours To: "Stuart Henderson" Cc: Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:30:48 +0100 On Wed Feb 25, 2026 at 4:13 PM CET, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2026/02/25 15:49, Marco van Hulten wrote: >> Hi, >> >> First off, there is no problem or patch here, but I want to make the >> following findable in the ports@ archive for anyone not understanding >> why not all 256 colours are shown in rxvt-unicode--everything. >> >> Even though 256 colours are always reported, only 88 colours are >> presented when using rxvt-unicode--everything. The solution was >> installing the non-flavoured rxvt-unicode port. >> >> The 'everything' flavour has --enable-everything, which enables most >> non-multichoice options. The configure option --enable-256-color is one >> of the exceptions. I was surprised by this, but memory use and >> compatibility are reasons for it. > > I'm a bit surprised at that actually, I wouldn't mind adding it to > --everything if that would be useful It turned out I did not need --everything. I imagine it may be useful (and less confusing) for at least some people. It's just that upstream seems to advice against it (README.configure): --enable-256-color (default: off) Force use of so-called 256 colour mode, to work around buggy applications that do not support termcap/terminfo, or simply improve support for applications hardcoding the xterm 256 colour table. This switch breaks termcap/terminfo compatibility to "TERM=rxvt-unicode", and consequently sets "TERM" to "rxvt-unicode-256color" by default (doc/etc/ contains termcap/terminfo definitions for both). It also results in higher memory usage and can slow down urxvt dramatically when more than six fonts are in use by a terminal instance. I am not in the position to judge if these arguments are (still) valid and outweigh the surprise. Marco