Re: COLORS and COLOR_PAIRS

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Michael D. Adams wrote:

> I discovered a little annoyance while using the Python ncurses binding
> so some of this may be due to that binding but I think it is true of
> ncurses in general.  If I do not call use_default_colors() then COLORS
> is 8 and COLOR_PAIRS is 64.  This is reasonable.  With colors 0 though
> 7 I can represent at most 64 pairs.  However if I do call
> use_default_colors(), COLORS and COLOR_PAIRS are still 8 and 64.  This
> introduces a limitation because now I can in theory represent colors
> -1 though 7 for 81 pairs, but ncurses limits me to 64.  My particular
> app is a text editor so I would like to provide all possible color
> combinations to downstream users.  (It is very unlikely that anyone
> will need all those colors at once, but I don't want to impose
> arbitrary limits.)

You can make a custom terminfo that sets the pairs value to whatever you
want (though more than 17*17 would be not very useful).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net