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Why do we have max. 256 colors in terminal emulators?

I just played with the 256-color VIM theme and noticed that 256 colors are sometimes not enough. I would like a terminal that supports at least a range of HTML colors 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 did I miss one, but someone already built one?

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1 answer

This is because how many colors you could encode in one byte. Not only this, in fact, most terminals had only 16 colors (using only 4 of 8 bits), the remaining 4 bits were flags used to indicate something with a character. The most common flags were: highlight, underline, blink, and vice versa; (or some other terminal features)

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/945665/

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