tsuu32 / emacs-w32con-vt

Emacs with 256/true color support in Windows Console

Emacs with 256/true color support in Windows Console

News

• 2020/09/26: Update the patch for Emacs 27.1

Background

• Current GNU Emacs in Windows Console (emacs -nw at cmd.exe) supports only 16 colors.
• Windows Console recently supports true color by Virtual Terminal sequences.
• Windows Terminal also supports Virtual Terminal sequences.
• Vim already supports truecolor in Windows Console. (See https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/cafafb381a04e33f3ce9cd15dd9f94b73226831f)

Build

Note: This is experimental. Current implementation is based on Emacs 27.1.

Prerequisites:

• Windows 10
• MSYS2 and MINGW-w64
• Dependancies are installed (See https://github.com/tsuu32/emacs-w32con-vt/blob/master/nt/INSTALL.W64)

Steps:

1. Clone this repo and ./autogen.sh to generate configure script in MSYS2 bash:

git clone https://github.com/tsuu32/emacs-w32con-vt.git
cd emacs-w32con-vt
./autogen.sh

2. Run configure with --with-w32-vt-color=NUMBER option:

./configure --without-dbus --with-w32-vt-color=24bit

You can set 16 or 256, 24bit for NUMBER.

3. Run Make:

make

Usage

Run Emacs in cmd.exe or powershell.exe:

rem for cmd.exe
set PATH=C:\msys64\mingw64\bin;%PATH%
path\to\emacs-w32con-vt\src\emacs.exe -nw

You can also run via Windows Terminal.

Screenshot

With zenburn theme.

Bug

• Starting emacs with no theme cause buggy at 24bit color.

Future work

• Autoconf support.
• Use escape sequences more (not only color).