Terminal emacs colors only work with TERM=xterm-256color

Question

I\'ve found that terminal emacs does not render the correct colors unless I explicitly set TERM=xterm-256color. I use gnome-terminal, and from what I understand, TERM should

Answer 1

Add this to your ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'term-file-aliases
    '("st-256color" . "xterm-256color"))

It tells emacs that if it sees TERM=st-256color then it should initialize the terminal as if it had seen TERM=xterm-256color.

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Longer answer:

Emacs is showing strange colors because it thinks your terminal can only support 8 colors. In Emacs, run M-x list-colors-display to see the colors it thinks are available. The correct number of colors is detected during terminal-specific initialization. It says, in part:

Each terminal type can have its own Lisp library that Emacs loads when run on that type of terminal.

On my machine, the terminal-specific initialization files are in /usr/local/share/emacs/25.*/lisp/term. It has files for xterm, rxvt, screen, etc. but nothing for st. We need to help Emacs find the right initialization file. The documentation further says:

If there is an entry matching TERM in the term-file-aliases association list, Emacs uses the associated value in place of TERM

So that association list is a recommended way to handle unknown terminals. It works without you having to manually override the TERM environment variable.