Re: Truecolor support in ncurses

[Egmont Koblinger]

Hi,

Thomas, you've just posted this link in midnight commander's
corresponding bugreport:
http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#xterm_16MegaColors

Please allow me to respond here.  I don't want to pollute mc's thread
with ncurses discussion, I believe it belongs to the ncurses list.

A couple of notes:

- The newest development version of gnome-terminal (actually vte
0.35.1) does support 16M colors, and both ";" and ":" as number
separators.

- On my computer "uname -m" reports x86_64, yet a "long long" is still
8 bytes only, just as a "long", hence I still believe that the demo
slang patch is actually ABI compatible on 64-bit machines.  Anyway, it
really doesn't matter since it's a demo only, clearly not acceptable
for mainstream without bumping major number because it does breaks
compatibility on 32-bit architectures, as I clearly said it.  I would
appreciate if you removed the statement from the doc that says I was
wrong, or actually proved me wrong first, thanks!

- You link a particular comment of a gnome bugreport, but if you read
carefully, the issue mentioned there is really not the bottleneck in
gnome-terminal's performance. It's probably unreasonable to assume
that an application would emit RGB color sequences where previously it
didn't emit anything, so a throughput drop of "more than 90%" is
overestimated. The worst case is if each letter is painted with a
different color, this is 6 bytes using the standard palette (including
the letter) and 20 bytes using direct RGB, which is a drop of 70%
worst case. It's not nice to have, but really should be negligible on
local computers (the most typical use) and networks have also sped up
by much more than that since the invention of the old escapes. If this
is still an issue for someone, they would be free to stick with 8
colors for better performance.

As much as I'd like to get this feature mode widespread and understand
what we could do (if anything) to have support in ncurses, you writing
a FAQ about why it's not done rather than responding in the thread
implies to me that you're really don't find it feasible to work on
this, so all I can do is sadly accept it and move on.

regards,
egmont