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
