MacOS – Terminal colors in Mavericks

By default, screen is not aware that it is running in a 256-color-capable xterm. To make programs in screen recognize this feature, you need to set a couple of things in your ~/.screenrc:

term "screen-256color"
# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I" 
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground 
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm' 
# erase background with current bg color 
defbce "on" 

If this doesn’t work for you, your version of screen probably wasn’t compiled with ./configure --enable-colors256. You can check this in the welcome screen when starting screen. The default version that comes with OS X doesn’t support 256 colors. You could check out the source and compile your own version, putting the resulting binary in your $PATH (I put it in ~/bin which I added to my $PATH):

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/screen.git
cd screen/src
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-colors256
make   # I got a lot of warnings here, but they don't seem to matter
sudo make install
cp screen ~/bin/screen

Sources: 1 and 2

In Solarized Dark.terminal and Solarized Light.terminal, the 2*8 ANSI colors are specified in the sRGB color space, which seems to be identical with Device RGB at least on my iMac. The text, bold text, selection, cursor, and background colors are untagged, or shown as Generic RGB in the color picker. Terminal doesn't convert either of them to the color space used by your display.

You can specify the colors using your display's color space manually. For each color:

• Click the color well, memorize the HSB or RGB values, and change the profile to the profile used by your display.

  

• Insert the values you memorized, which should be the same as the values shown in the table in http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized.

In Solarized Dark.terminal:

• The background color is base02 (black)
• The text color is base0 (brblue)
• The color for bold text is base1 (brcyan)
• The cursor color is base01 (brgreen)
• The selection color is base2 (white)

On my iMac the background and foreground colors in Solarized Dark.terminal were initially too bright, but the color space used by my iMac is fairly close to sRGB, so most of the ANSI colors were not that far off.