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I made some animations and a game that are to be played in the terminal and they rely on the terminal only having 8 colors available. When I run them on a Terminal that has 16 colors available (particularly obvious when you run neofetch and see the colors available) they do not render properly at all.

Is there a quick and dirty way to force a linux terminal to use only 8 colors?

Edit: The problem may also be that I was using an older version of ncurses on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS when I made these programs. I am attempting to get them to look right on a distro with an up-to-date version of the library. For anyone interested in attempting to answer the question I originally posed I'll still accept anything that demonstrates ways to force gnome-terminal to revert to 8-color mode if that's even possible.

Edit: The problem was related to my frequent use of standend() to revert the drawing functions back to white on black text. For some reason this was not doing what I expected it to do on some distros. By explictly telling it to attron() a color pair that was defined explictly as black and white I solved the problem. This is a hacky and hard-coded solution that stems from my abusing the ncurses library in a hard-coded way. Consider this solved, although I'd be interested in some digestible resources on programming with raw escape sequences for the future to better understand this problem.

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  • Set TERM=xterm?
    – muru
    Nov 3, 2019 at 6:38
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    more likely you're trying to use some hardcoded script, which ignores TERM (or makes silly assumptions, such as "vt100s do color").
    – Thomas Dickey
    Nov 3, 2019 at 12:04
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    Without seeing the scripts, one can only guess. The terminal description for "xterm" says the terminal only supports the standard ANSI 8 colors, but a program can ignore that, doing whatever the terminal actually supports.
    – Thomas Dickey
    Nov 3, 2019 at 18:18
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    If you have a solution, please post it as an answer instead of editing the question.
    – muru
    Nov 5, 2019 at 6:20

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The problem was related to my frequent use of standend() to revert the drawing functions back to white on black text. For some reason this was not doing what I expected it to do on some distros. By explictly telling it to attron() a color pair that was defined explictly as black and white I solved the problem. This is a hacky and hard-coded solution that stems from my abusing the ncurses library in a hard-coded way.

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