What is the difference between xterm-color & xterm-256color?

Question

I\'ve come across both xterm-color and xterm-256color as options when trying to set up my terminal program to use color - i.e. you can set your

Answer 1

It appears that xterm-256color is Terminal.app on OS/X. The differences are not tiny - I infocmp'd xterm-color and xterm-256color on an Ubuntu box and normalized them a bit, and got quite a few differences. I might even say xterm-256color isn't really xterm anymore.

Normally when you use a specific terminal emulator, you need to "just know" which terminfo entry works best with it. They're a matching pair, though sometimes you can, EG, use a vt100 terminfo entry on a vt220 terminal.

On the plus side, almost everything is vt100-compatible today.