Colourful TTY Emacs


graphical vs text based emacs

For many years, I've seen avid Emacs users on the interweb say that they use text based Emacs (aka TTY Emacs) exclusively. I've never understood this as text based Emacs looks crap compared to a graphical one. The UI look as flat as VIM and the colour themes look awful.

Last week, though, I took a hard look at what can be done to make TTY Emacs look better and I found out that some folks use terminals with 24 bit colours.

There's no easy way to get this, though, since apparently there's no proper "24 bit colour terminal standard". Still, it's fairly easy to get working though, once you put your mind to it:

Create a termcap file for 24 bit colours

I created a xterm-24bit.terminfo file as is described in the GNU Emacs FAQ and installed it in my local termcap registry with:

$ tic -x -o ~/.terminfo xterm-24bit.terminfo 

Use a good Terminal

For years and years, I've used urxvt, but it didn't like my new termcap file one bit. My trusty fall back terminal, Konsole, also had problems making heads or tails of the new setup. I then saw some folks recommend kitty, which turned out to cope with 24 bit colours just fine, as well as 4 byte UTF-8 characters, which I've been missing out of when using urxvt.

What kitty installed, I was ready to put those new colours to good use.

Set TERM to xterm-24bit

I could now use the above termcap file by setting the TERM environment variable. You can either export it (put export TERM=xterm-24bits in your .bashrc) or just put it in front of the command you want to run with 24 bit colours:

$ TERM=xterm-24bits emacs -nw

Enjoy a super colourful TTY Emacs

After starting text based Emacs with the above environment variable, you can verify that it's working by running M-x list-colors-display. If it lists more than 256 colours, it's working. I'm getting more than 500 colours bringing it on part with my graphical Emacs.

In the picture at the top of this page, you can on the left see my graphical Emacs running under X using the Atom One Dark theme and on the right TTY Emacs using the same theme. I'm now quite happy to run text based Emacs whole days at a time, because as Mark Shuttleworth wrote, pretty is a feature 😉


Licensed under CC BY Creative Commons License ~ ✉ torstein.k.johansen @ gmail ~ 🐘 @skybert@emacs.ch ~ 🐦 @torsteinkrause