Dev: Terminal beyond 8 colors

Check whether your terminal supports 256 colors,

tput colors

You can check available terminal database under /lib/terminfo/ sub-directory. If you could find a database file suffixed with 256color, then you can use them to set the TERM environment variable. Most of the terminal application will be using this variable to setup its color scheme. Now add the following line in your shell’s rc file, eg., $HOME/.zshrc

export TERM=xterm-256color

If you are an zsh user, then you have to setup keyboard mapping for the terminal as well. You can choose to ignore this short cut and redo the mapping manually when you start the zsh shell next time.

cd ~/.zkbd
cp xterm-pc-linux-gnu xterm-256color-pc-linux-gnu

Setup color scheme for Vim

There are many good schemes available for vim. Download / checkout links are available from bottom of this section, download and copy them to your $HOME/.vim/colors/ directory and add the following line in $HOME/.vimrc file,

color jellybeans

Inside Vim, you can change the colors on the fly by doing:

:color solarized

solarized, jellybeans, ir_black, hemisu are some good color schemes, there is also a collection of themes available from github.

Configuring readline

Most terminal applications that does not require full-screen rendering will be using the readline library to control the terminal output. To interact with such applications using vim or Emacs key-binding, there is a global configuration for that.