Not too long ago I posted a snippet that explained how to enable the 256-color display capabilities of terminals that support it. I’ve since had a bit of trouble getting this to work in terminals under Cygwin. Applications like Vim understand the capabilities of such a terminal, but less and man would complain:
WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
After bit of digging I finally realised that it isn’t enough to have entries for those terminal types in /usr/share/terminfo/*/*. Some apps expect to find the terminal capabilties described in a termcap file, either /etc/termcap or ~/.termcap. Fortunately, there is an easy way to export the capabilities described in the terminfo database entries to a termcap file:
$ infocmp -C xterm-256color >> ~/.termcap
If you’re a screen user, its worth exporting the entry for screen-256color too. man infocmp for more information.
When using Ubuntu’s Terminal with a dark colour scheme, it may be worth changing the palette used by the application: under Edit > Profile Preferences > Colors
I’ve found ‘XTerm’ a good choice.