On Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Gary Johnson wrote:

On 2012-03-01, howardb21 wrote:

On Mar 1, 7:05 pm, Gary Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

    Vim can display the matches in a simplistic popup menu.

    The menu is used when:
    [...]
    - The terminal supports at least 8 colors.
    [...]
[...]

[...] Why I wonder are colors needed to display a menu?

That I don't know.

Vim needs a way to visually indicate that the menu is a menu, and it doesn't do so by drawing a box (I assume that's due to historically-limited screen space and/or differences in box-drawing between terminals). Also, Vim indicates which item is currently selected through color. So, the way Vim does it (without the box), you need at a very minimum 3 colors:

           +-----------------+
Normal Text|_________________|
           |Selected popup   |
           |Nonselected popup|
           +-----------------+

Most terminals that support 3 colors support the standard(ish) ANSI 8/16 colors¹ (8 or 16 depending on whether 'bright' is bright). So, minimum 8.

Maybe it would be good to change Vim to fallback to a "blocky" menu
mechanism. More likely, it's not worth the effort, since terminals usually support at least 8 colors.

--
Best,
Ben

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors

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