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: <a href="http://developer.apple.com/BugReporter/" rel="nofollow">http://developer.apple.com/BugReporter/</a>
People who liked this also liked:<p><a href="http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/</a><p>and:<p><a href="http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/data/256colors2.pl" rel="nofollow">http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/data/256colors2.pl</a><p>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 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.<p>Quite an upgrade if you use emacs -nw.
I started using 256 color terminal a couple of years ago...there are a handful of <i>really</i> 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 <i>wanting</i> 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.