How do I set up emacs colors correctly?

Question

I've set up two versions:

My computer      apt-get   emacs 23.0.91
Remote server    yum       emacs 21.4

I've downloaded color-theme-6.6.0, put the files in /usr/share/emacs/-version-/lisp/, and I have this in my .emacs:

(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-initialize)
(color-theme-midnight)

Running emacs in a terminal, all the colors show up correctly on my computer, but on the server, I only get two colors??? The background is one color, and the text is another, no matter what theme I choose. No errors show up when I start emacs.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Paraphrased from Unix and Color Highlighting:

To be able to use syntax highlighting on a Unix/Linux box you need either a terminal that supports color. Some systems (AIX for me) require a TERMINFO file generated by tic on a xterm-color.tic file. Here's a snip:

 setenv TERMINFO /home/cfl/lib/terminfo
 tic xterm-color
 setenv TERM xterm-color

Again, read the Unix and Color Highlighting article for all the details.

---

On another note, this is what my .emacs file contains for setting color (on a dark background).

;; Maximum colors
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)

(setq frame-background-mode 'dark)

(setq auto-mode-alist '(("\\.ad[bs]\\'"   . ada-mode)
                        ("\\.awk\\'"      . awk-mode)
                        ("\\.lex\\'"      . c-mode)
                        ("\\.[cy]\\'"     . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.h\\'"        . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.hxx\\'"      . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.[CH]\\'"     . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.java\\'"     . java-mode)
                        ("\\.cc\\'"       . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.hh\\'"       . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.cxx\\'"      . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.cpp\\'"      . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.rc\\'"       . c++-mode) ;; resource files
                        ("\\.rcv\\'"      . c++-mode)
                        ("\\.m\\'"        . matlab-mode)
                        ("\\.p[lm]\\'"    . perl-mode)
                        ("\\.cgi\\'"      . perl-mode)
                        ("\\.f\\'"      . fortran-mode)
                        ("\\.F\\'"      . fortran-mode)
                        ("\\.f90\\'"      . f90-mode)
                        ("\\.F90\\'"      . f90-mode)
                        ("\\.el\\'"       . emacs-lisp-mode)
                        ("\\.emacs\\'"    . emacs-lisp-mode)
                        ("\\.tex\\'"      . LaTeX-mode)
                        ("\\.bib\\'"      . bibtex-mode)
                        ("[Mm]akefile\\'" . makefile-mode)
                        ("\\.mak\\'"      . makefile-mode)
                        ("\\[Mm]akefile.\\'" . makefile-mode)
                        ("\\.bat\\'"      . shell-script-mode)
                        ("\\.tar\\'"      . tar-mode)
                        ("\\.php\\'"     . php-mode)
                        ("\\.html\\'"     . html-mode)
                        ("\\.jnlp\\'"     . html-mode)
                        ("\\.xml\\'"     . html-mode)
                        ("\\.pddl\\'"     . lisp-mode)
                        ("\\.css\\'"      . css-mode)
                        ("\\.py\\'"       . python-mode)
                        ("\\.yml\\'"      . yaml-mode)
                        ("\\.lisp\\'"     . lisp-mode)))

Answer 2

You need to set the environment variable TERM like so (assuming bash shell):

export TERM="xterm-256color"

If you are running emacs from within screen, you will have to add the following to your .screenrc similarly.

term screen-256color

If this doesn't work, it may be because your system doesn't have the appropriate termcap installed. On a deb/ubuntu system, for example, you would have to:

apt-get install ncurses-term

I am not certain on an rpm based system but make sure that ncurses and termcap installed.