app-misc/screen with 'term screen-256color' in .screenrc is supposed to display the 256-color scheme as they would be displayed without screen but it doesn't. For example the color-output of app-portage/eix is different (as seen in the to be uploaded screenshots). An unmodified gentoo-default /etc/screenrc is used with or without the line 'term screen-256color' in ~/.screenrc . The screenshots are made within kde-base/konsole. They are the same in xterm. For testing colors I used a perl-testscript I found on the net (I lost the link but I will upload the script here as well). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge app-misc/screen 2. create ~/.screenrc with 'term screen-256color' in it. 3. call e.g. eix-diff or 256colors2.pl 4. start screen and call again 5. see the difference Actual Results: The output is not colorized in the same way. Expected Results: The output should be exactly the same. Script and screenshots are following.
Created attachment 327060 [details] color testing script
Created attachment 327062 [details] screenshot of script-output in plain konsole all good in a plain kde-base/konsole session.
Created attachment 327064 [details] screenshot of script-output in konsole + screen The colors appear as screen would not have 256color support enabled. (although it definitely changes something. see the eix-diff screenshots)
Created attachment 327066 [details] screenshot of eix-diff in plain konsole for reference
Created attachment 327068 [details] screenshot of eix-diff in konsole + screen without 256colors the line 'term screen-256color' is disabled here. The colors are different here but that's okay I suppose.
Created attachment 327070 [details] screenshot of eix-diff in konsole + screen with 256colors 'term screen-256color' enabled here. It looks different than the screenshot of eix-diff in plain konsole.
For most applications, the output of echo "$TERM" is relevant. If this is "screen", there is no way for an application to know whether the actually emulated terminal can display 8 or 256 colors: The terminal will "understand" 256 colors, but e.g. if screen is running on a linux console, it is attempted to "map" the 256 colors to only 8 colors which can produce unreadable results (e.g. most colors which eix uses are just mapped to "green"). For this reason, eix (and some other applications like vim) will only use a 256 color scheme if you have TERM=screen-256color (or specify it somehow explicitly in a configuration file). For eix, you can override this by setting TERM_ALT correspondingly (see the eix manpage; use eix --print TERM_ALT to see the default). Since you refer particularly to eix-diff: eix-diff had a bug in eix-0.27.1 and did not honour TERM_ALT as documented; this is fixed in >=eix-0.27.2.
