Friday, February 06, 2009

UNIX colors and tools

Just opened a new package of colored chalk so I'll write on my blackboard :-).



Can't really have fun without:

  • OpenSSH
  • GNU screen
  • KornShell 93, AWK, 1003.1 Shell & Utilities
  • Emacs, ed
  • Mutt
  • Midnight Commander (mc)
  • Elinks
  • Terminus font (sure, it's not a tool, but it sure as hell helps , especially during those 20 hour debugging sessions).
Emacs linum plugin + a 256 color TERMINFO entry + transparent putty can look pretty good:




256 colors _really_ do make quite a difference in Emacs (and vim) btw. Normal dtterm or xterm-color get you the first 8...



All you really need to do to get this working on AIX is to add a new TERMINFO entry (tic). You can easily grab the 256 color xterm with infocmp..

/usr/bin/tput colors
256




VIM looks pretty good too with a 256 color theme also (inkpot):

3 comments:

Slestak said...

My termcap does not have entries for xterm-256, xterm-256color, or screen-256color. Not quite sure how to install these (or make them with infocmp and tic).

cmihai said...

You can grab one from any system that has it with infocmp, and install the result with tic.

Something along the lines of:
export TERM=xterm-256colors; infocmp > xterm-256colors.tic on any machine that has such a term.

Then on the machine you want to install it to:
tic xterm-256colors.tic
export TERM=xterm-256colors
"tput colors" will output 256.

I don't remember where I took mine from, I just kept a copy.

I've pasted a infocmp dump of xterm-256colors here:
http://paste.lisp.org/display/91833

You should be able to save this to disk as xterm-256colors.tic and import it into the terminfo database using tic.

Sequethin said...

Thanks so much for this! I had mistakenly copied my pre-compiled terminfo entries from my mac to my linux server and wondered why it wasn't working correctly! using infocmp to export the info and then tic to compile it is much better!