M-x ansi-term colors in Emacs 24.x

Question

I have noticed that some colors in LS_COLORS don't work when running a shell inside M-x-ansi-term in Emacs.

For exmaple;

di 00 94 

is supposed to turn on bold on light blue on directories on LS_COLORS (see a list of the codes here), but ansi-term in Emacs does not show it in color. In fact, only the simple colors listed on that website seem to work under ansi-term in Emacs, while they work perfectly well on my regular gnome terminal.

Is there a way to get ansi-term to recognize the so called extra colors? Where/how can I look up the colors supported by ansi-term in Emacs?

Answer 1

How about this command?

M-x ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on

Answer 2

ansi-term supports the 8 ANSI colors, using TERM=eterm-color. That gives you basic colors, e.g., as shown in Why dialog doesn't support emacs shell on Debian? (sic).

That 94 is not one of the 8 ANSI colors. It comes (originally) from aixterm, but was widely used because it was implemented in xterm in the late 1990s, as seen in ncurses terminal database entry xterm-16color. dircolors, of course does not use the terminal database...

According to the Emacs wiki on AnsiColor, there is an alternative xterm-colors.el which can support more colors.

According to that page (atomontage/xterm-color), it can support xterm 256-colors. Reading the script, I can see some omissions with respect to xterm, but colors should work.