On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 17:05 +0000, Beartooth wrote: > On another list, one poster made a marginal enthusiastic remark, saying > > > I love the new 256-color + transparency support for xterm, it works great > > in Fedora Core 6 using mrxvt. > > Very Dumb Question : is there somewhere I can get a rundown on the > differing virtues of whatever-all terminal emulators are available? Not that I know of. But this was correct as of ~6 months ago when I last looked into it. 256 colors: xterm-256 and gnome-terminal 88 colors: rxvt (probably also eterm, konsole, and others) 16 colors: pretty much everything else The 256 color support in gnome-terminal is actually provided by libvte, so anything that takes advantage of that will also get 256 colors. This is very, very useful for vim, because it gives you the same range of colors as you would get in gvim. Actually, during the time when only xterm had 256 colors (and libvte did not), I switched my terminal to xterm just for this reason. The other features like transparency and what not are pretty standard and don't make a big difference. The exception here is that if you are using a compositing window manager, gnome-terminal will support _real_ transparency. This means that if you turn on transparency in the terminal, the background of the terminal will become semi-transparent so you can see the windows and other things behind it, but the window border and the text in the terminal will be fully opaque. You can probably guess what terminal emulator I recommend you use :-) -- Evan Klitzke
