Emacs doesn't want to support 256 colors in terminal window

[Grzegorz Junka]

Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:31:55 +0000, Grzegorz Junka <cv at gjunka.com> wrote:
>   
>> FreeBSD port doesn't allow to configure Emacs in any way, neither from
>> the original port, nor from the nox11 version. I don't think there is
>> any special option for emacs to show 256 colors. Wherever I could find
>> some information about this, people were saying that Emacs version
>>     
>>> = 22 supports 256 colors without any additional configuration. As I
>>>       
>> mentioned, Emacs not only doesn't show 256 colors, but not even 16,
>> which I bet should be supported without any problems. No matter what I
>> get only 8 colors, even if terminal is able to shows much much more.
>>
>> Another strange thing is that as far as I can see xterm-256color in
>> FreeBSD termcap is simply an alias to xterm. Nevertheless, with these
>> scripts mentioned above I can view more than 16 colors even if TERM is
>> defined only as xterm.
>>
>> Do you think I should report it as a defect in emacs ports?
>>     
>
> It might be.  I'll try to see if I can get Emacs to display 256 colors
> in an xterm, but in the mean time can you please collect all your recent
> findings in a problem report?  It will be auto-assigned to me :)
>   
If you haven't seen my response to the other email in the thread, then 
the progress is that I should be using tput Co, not tput colors. I tried 
all these configurations mentioned in my email and I see that tput Co 
always reports 8, regardless of what tput colors reports. That might be 
explaining the problem with emacs. Now, why tput reports 8 even if the 
(logical) terminal is defined as xterm-color or xterm-256color? Well, 
maybe the problem is not in emacs but in termcap/terminfo?