Mac OS X's Terminal.app does not support 256 colors. Submit a feature request to Apple if you would wish it did -- I do. Apple Bug Reporter: http://developer.apple.com/BugReporter/

First off, why are you using Terminal.app? :)

I use iTerm mostly because a) tabs! b) I'm a sysadmin and have a ton of bookmarks for ssh connections to various servers (frequent ones with keystroke shortcuts). c) profiles are handy.

iTerm seems to support 256 colors.

Edit: Terminal.app seems to support tabs, must be new in Leopard :)

People who liked this also liked:

http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/

and:

http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/data/256colors2.pl

which is a perl script to show you what your terminal can do. PuTTY answers 8 to tput colors (CentOS 4.7) but is capable of 256.

This is the first time I learned that "brightblack" exists...

Now I won't be surprised if I see darkwhite and reddishgreen.

This is about xterm-256color. It's very much worth it, if you care about colors in your terminal. You will discover more and more subtle differences.

Quite an upgrade if you use emacs -nw.

I started using 256 color terminal a couple of years ago...there are a handful of really nice vim color schemes that take advantage of it. I'm a sucker for nice syntax highlighting, and this change made me happy for days. I found myself wanting to write more code so I could see it in the all it's colorful glory. That feeling has passed, however, so maybe I need to find another color scheme to try.

What color scheme did you use? I find myself loving the dark vim themes.

I think I've settled on desert at the moment. It's dark background, with very mellow highlight colors. Angry fruit salad it is not.

desert eh? I settled down with ir_black. It's pretty light on the eyes. I love it.

This would be nice, but most terminals only support 8 colors from what I've seen, and 8 colors should be enough for anyone!

Try rxvt-unicode, it's a great, light terminal app for *nixes and can be compiled with 256 color support. (see the PKGBUILD: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=13060)

Most? I tried non-Linux OSs to see what you're talking about. PuTTY on Windows works perfectly. Yes, Terminal on MacOS X doesn't support 256 colors, but iTerm does.

Unfortunately AFAIK it seems OS X's Terminal.app doesn't support 256 colors.

Have you tried using an X11.app terminal instead of Terminal.app terminal? That may have different/better results.

Yeah, this was an unpleasant surprise for me when I started using a Macbook for some coding. My 256 color vim color scheme (desert256, highly recommended!) would just blink repeatedly until I typed in t_Co=8 ... never thought moving from a Linux machine to a Mac would mean decreasing your colors!