Colors

[Sbozzolo]

The following screenshot is how ansi-term (top left) with eterm-256colors, vterm (top right) and xterm look like on my machine.

Also comparing other programs, e.g. htop, it seems that vterm produces output only with (probably) 8 colors.
However, tput colors reports the number 256, and also other scripts to print the complete palette successfully show all the colors.

(I am using zsh, if it's relevant)

Why is that?

[akermu]

Might be because we set $TERM to xterm instead of xterm-256color here. Can you modify vterm.el and try it out?

In general emacs-libvterm supports 256 colors.

[Sbozzolo]

Nothing changes when I set xterm-256color instead of xterm. Also, my xterm sets TERM to xterm.

[akermu]

Mhm currently the module should break, if you encounter a color from the 256 palette. The issue above might be related to the ansi-colors, where you can define 8 normal colors and 8 high intensity colors. The module currently don't differentiate between them, so this might lead to the differences in the output above.

[akermu]

So I fixed a lot regarding color handling in 920d847. Does your issue still persist?

[Sbozzolo]

I pulled, recompiled, restarted emacs. This is what I see now:

Not only the issue persists, but not also the background is messed up.

[akermu]

Did you adjust your color configuration according to the changes? There are new variables.

[Sbozzolo]

No, I wasn't setting those variables before, nor I was expecting that I had to set them. Shouldn't they default to the values the theme sets?

[akermu]

Themes have to support each package individually, if they define their own faces (Have a look at zenburn.

Anyway with 976c3f2, I think I finally nailed color handling. No more faces, and your themes color theme should be picked up automatically :)

[Sbozzolo]

This is what I see now:

It seems much better, but the background is still off.
I'm using solarized, which sets ansi-color-vector-names and ansi-color-vector-faces.

(Thanks for your amazing work, by the way!)

[akermu]

Thanks :) What's the value of ansi-color-vector-names? For me it seems to work:

[Sbozzolo]

This is what I have in the .el file:

(ansi-color-names-vector (vector ,normal ,red ,green ,yellow ,blue ,magenta ,cyan ,background))

where:

;; name     sRGB      Gen RGB   256       16              8
(base03  (if srgb "#002b36" "#042028")) ; (0.0159 0.1265 0.1597)
(base02  (if srgb "#073642" "#0a2832")) ; (0.0394 0.1601 0.1983)
(base01  (if srgb "#586e75" "#465a61")) ; (0.2767 0.3567 0.3830)
(base00  (if srgb "#657b83" "#52676f")) ; (0.3244 0.4072 0.4385)
(base0   (if srgb "#839496" "#708183")) ; (0.4406 0.5096 0.5169)
(base1   (if srgb "#93a1a1" "#81908f")) ; (0.5060 0.5649 0.5636)
(base2   (if srgb "#eee8d5" "#e9e2cb")) ; (0.9161 0.8900 0.7978)
(base3   (if srgb "#fdf6e3" "#fcf4dc")) ; (0.9894 0.9579 0.8641)
(yellow  (if srgb "#b58900" "#a57705")) ; (0.6475 0.4675 0.0235)
(orange  (if srgb "#cb4b16" "#bd3612")) ; (0.7418 0.2133 0.0735)
(red     (if srgb "#dc322f" "#c60007")) ; (0.7770 0.0000 0.0290)
(magenta (if srgb "#d33682" "#c61b6e")) ; (0.7774 0.1080 0.4352)
(violet  (if srgb "#6c71c4" "#5859b7")) ; (0.3479 0.3514 0.7179)
(blue    (if srgb "#268bd2" "#2075c7")) ; (0.1275 0.4627 0.7823)
(cyan    (if srgb "#2aa198" "#259185")) ; (0.1468 0.5708 0.5250)
(green   (if srgb "#859900" "#728a05")) ; (0.4498 0.5412 0.0202)
(foregrounds (list base1 base0 base00 base01))
(backgrounds (list base03 base02))

And I believe it is also relevant to point out that normal and background are set as:

(background (nth 0 backgrounds))
(normal (nth 1 foregrounds))

You can have a look at the whole file here.

[suonlight]

Themes have to support each package individually, if they define their own faces (Have a look at zenburn.

Anyway with 976c3f2, I think I finally nailed color handling. No more faces, and your themes color theme should be picked up automatically :)

It does not work for me. I'm using doom-nord.

[deadtrickster]

TBH I'm greatly confused after moving to 'ansi-color-names-vector - seems like custom backgrounds aren't supported anymore?

[Bee-Mar]

I've been attempting to fix the colors on my theme as well. Some of them don't appear to be getting picked up. Also, setting the faces, mentioned on the README, doesn't seem to have any affect whatsoever.

This is how htop should be rendering the colors, when run within gnome-terminal:

This is how htop renders the colors within vterm inside Emacs:

The extra colors that would normally be used to indicate the CPU and RAM usage are being picked up as black, rather than gray (it might be hard to initially tell what's missing from the second photo). It's definitely not a deal breaker, but it's not working correctly.

Changing the ansi-color-names-vector seems to be the only thing that works.

This is currently what I have:

'(ansi-color-names-vector
   ["#000000" "red" "#00FF00" "yellow" "#003CFF" "#FF00FF" "#00FFFF" "#FFFFFF"])

Edit:

Also, i happened to open up emacs inside of terminal, and ran htop within, and it picked up all the colors correctly. This isn't me saying "huh, I wonder why that happened", but more of an observation.

[akermu]

@Sbozzolo @Bee-Mar Could you please recheck, now that #82 is merged?

[Sbozzolo]

My comments in #82 still apply. It's a massive improvement, but there are still minor problems, the biggest one being that autosuggestions provided by my shell are not readable as they are rendered with the wrong color. However, I want to stress that #82 made the difference for me, effectively making the package usable as a daily driver. What is left to be fixed are smaller details

[akermu]

Could you please post the settings for your terminal, where the colors are working as expected? Thanks!

[Sbozzolo]

I am attaching my Xresources, which powers my xterm.

Alternatively, I use eterm-256color, and ansi-term.

I use the color-theme-sanityinc-solarized theme.

Xresources.txt

[akermu]

So if you ran this code:

(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-default nil :foreground "#839496" :background "#002b36")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-black nil :foreground "#073642" :background "#002b36")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-red nil :foreground "#dc322f" :background "#cb4b16")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-green nil :foreground "#859900" :background "#586e75")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-yellow nil :foreground "#b58900" :background "#657b83")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-blue nil :foreground "#268bd2" :background "#839496")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-magenta nil :foreground "#d33682" :background "#6c71c4")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-cyan nil :foreground "#2aa198" :background "#93a1a1")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-white nil :foreground "#eee8d5" :background "#fdf6e3")

the colors are still not correct?

[Sbozzolo]

Exactly, the colors are still not correct. I mean, the problem with the autosuggestion is still there.

[akermu]

How do you get those autosuggestions? With zsh-autosuggestions or do you use the fish shell? And if you use the first one, have you set ZSH_AUTOSUGGEST_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE anywhere?

[Sbozzolo]

I use zsh-autosuggestions with no custom configuration at all.

Thanks for looking into this

[akermu]

Okay by default it chooses the black light variant for the autosuggestion, see https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions/blob/43f3bc4010b2c697d2252fdd8b36a577ea125881/src/config.zsh#L10. So this is equivalent the :background attribute of vterm-color-black. Could you please set this face attribute to different values and look if the rendered autosuggestion is affected?

[Sbozzolo]

I set it to 10 and it looks beautiful.

[akermu]

Could you confirm that emacs-libvterm renders the color according to ZSH_AUTOSUGGEST_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE, so there's no error in its color selection?

[Sbozzolo]

I am using this page as reference: https://coderwall.com/p/pb1uzq/z-shell-colors

This is what I get

To be compared with:

I think that there is still something off in the first 8 colors. For instance, color 0 and color 16 looks the same in the correct screenshot (the second), but not on mine.

[jixiuf]

this should be the problem of solarized theme
related links:
mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes#62

the default solarized theme for iterm2 has same problem
can be fixed with this :
altercation/solarized#220 (comment)
altercation/solarized#220 (comment)

[Sbozzolo]

That's interesting. Hence, I think that this issue can be closed!

[akagr]

So if you ran this code:

(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-default nil :foreground "#839496" :background "#002b36")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-black nil :foreground "#073642" :background "#002b36")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-red nil :foreground "#dc322f" :background "#cb4b16")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-green nil :foreground "#859900" :background "#586e75")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-yellow nil :foreground "#b58900" :background "#657b83")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-blue nil :foreground "#268bd2" :background "#839496")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-magenta nil :foreground "#d33682" :background "#6c71c4")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-cyan nil :foreground "#2aa198" :background "#93a1a1")
(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-white nil :foreground "#eee8d5" :background "#fdf6e3")

the colors are still not correct?

Thanks for teaching me about this. The variable vterm-color-black was set to a light shade of gray for some reason, and it looked weird on a couple of applications (k9s being one of them). I've set it to proper black for now and don't notice anything breaking.

(set-face-attribute 'vterm-color-black nil :foreground "#000000" :background "#000000")