Alex Leigh: > So my question is, is it possible to get 256 colors > with Cygwin running on top of cmd.exe?
As Corinna already said: nope. Windows represents console colours with only four bits: red, green, blue, bright: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682013%28v=VS.85%29.aspx Only thing you can do is change the resulting 16 colours in the console properties. (A bit of pedantry: Cygwin programs don't run on top of cmd.exe; they run in console windows. On Windows 7 those are managed by conhost.exe. Cmd.exe is just another program that runs in a console window.) > If this is not possible, then does anyone have any advice on ways to > have compatibility with both Unix terminal features including 256 > color and Windows console programs within a single terminal app? The > only solution of this sort I've found is conin.exe from the developers > of mintty. It does provide half the solution in that it allows input > to be piped from mintty to Windows console programs, but unfortunately > it's not possible to see the output from those programs. Conin isn't quite that useless. It works ok for programs that only depend on stdin being a console, e.g. python, scala, and cmd.exe, although there are quirks. With others such as the mysql client, output does work, but you don't get a prompt because it checks whether both stdin and stdout are consoles to decide whether to enter interactive mode. Output will fail completely though when programs use console-specific output functions, in particular WriteConsole and WriteConsoleOutput. Which programs are the problem cases for you? Andy -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
