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I was just fiddling around with a 256 color VIM theme and noticed that 256 colors are just not enough sometimes. I would love a terminal that supports at least the HTML color range from #000000 to #FFFFFF (65536 colors).

So i asked myself...

  • Is there a good reason why there is no terminal emulator with more than 256 colors?

  • Or am i missing out on one and somebody already built one?

Patrick Oscity
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  • There are plenty of terminal emulators with more than 256 colors. Very often vim just requires that the right environment is set. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/256_colors_in_vim – msw May 23 '13 at 09:31
  • I have 256 colors working in my environent, i was just wondering if one could have more... Thanks though! – Patrick Oscity May 23 '13 at 09:44
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    possible duplicate of [Are there terminals that support true color?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6403744/are-there-terminals-that-support-true-color) – Patrick Oscity May 23 '13 at 09:45

1 Answers1

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It's because that's how many colors you could encode in a single byte. Not only that, actually most terminals only had 16 colors (using only 4 of the 8 bits) the other 4 bits were flags used to indicate some thing to do with a character. Most common flags were: highlight, underline, blinking and reverse; (or some other terminal capability)

Ahmed Masud
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