[question] Should not we enable xterm-256color on mintty by default?

[luau-project]

Description

Note

Since I am relatively new to terminal-related topics, I opened this issue to read opinions from people with more experience on this subject, because I don't know very well the possible impacts of the proposed changes.

My question is: Given that Mintty is the default terminal emulator for MSYS2 environments and has support even for 24-bit colors, should not we set Term=xterm-256color on /etc/minttyrc, which seems to be described on this file https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/blob/master/mintty/minttyrc?

Tip

I am aware that each user can make such config changes by placing Term=xterm-256color on ~/.minttyrc.

My question is grounded on a few facts:

• MSYS2 supports Windows 10+ (maybe 8.1?). So, I don't see much of a problem on setting xterm-256color on such recent OSes;

• Ubuntu 24.04 (gnome terminal) uses xterm-256color by default. Probably, most recent distros too.

• If you open a cmd prompt on MSYS2 install folder (assuming an unmodified standard install at C:\msys64), and echo the TERM environment variable on bash through mintty, you get xterm as a response. On the other hand, if you echo TERM through bash directly, you get xterm-256color. So, it seems like that the default TERM used by bash is xterm-256color, and mintty is just overriding it:

Drawbacks

Quoting from mintty wiki:

The xterm−256color setting enables 256-color mode in some applications, but may not be recognised at all by others, which is why plain xterm is the default.

However, I'm not sure how well it applies for the MSYS2 environments.

Benefits

Bash script used below:

#!/usr/bin/bash

for c in {0..255}; do
    tput setaf ${c};
    echo -n "$c ";
done;

tput sgr0;
echo;

• In the current setup with xterm

• When xterm-256color is enabled

[eabase]

I was just wondering about this myself. My suspicion is that the defaulter directory file highlights, ls --color=always, grep --color=always and less with color-highlight package, breaks. I recently got the legacy warning about using old style color coding, which is the only one reliable.