Enable 256 colors for cygwin under mintty

cygwin;minttyterminal

I am using cygwin via mintty, which is the default. I installed ncurses. I then run these commands to see what my color pallet is for this terminal session:

$ tput colors
8

I have googled but so far nothing. How can I get a nice 256 color palette for my mintty cygwin terminal instead of the default (lame) 8 colors?

Best Answer

Try export TERM=xterm-256color or equivalent. You can add that to the appropriate dotfile if you want it to be persistent. You can use a 256-color demo script like this to verify functionality.

Related Solutions

How to change colors on-the-fly in mintty

See here: http://code.google.com/p/mintty/wiki/Tips#Changing_colours

Windows – How to check if cygwin mintty/bash is run as administrator

I just wrote this function for the same reason. I never know which shell has admin privileges.

function isadmin()
{
    net session > /dev/null 2>&1
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "admin"
    else echo "user"; fi
}

It adapted from this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/11995662/307968 for windows cmd shell. Net Session returns 0 status if you are admin.

Now I just need to change my prompt, or maybe the titlebar color....

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to change colors on-the-fly in mintty

Windows – How to check if cygwin mintty/bash is run as administrator

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