I've tried really hard for many years to not learn about termcaps and the diff between TERM=xterm, vt200, vt100, etc.
But too often ssh'ing in from Linux & macOS, my color palette is slightly wrong or page up/down don't work and I just try diff until it works.
Reference recs?
Conversation
I've read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termcap and see gnu.org/software/termu but I'm looking for a summary of which TERM=foo names do/add what.
Also, it seems like "TERM=screen screen -d -r" seems pretty fancy. Italics, even!? Page up/down works, color respecting my prefs TBD.
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It seems some TERM=foo values respect the ~16 colors in my terminal profile preferences, and some TERM=bar values must support larger palettes (or arbitrary colors), and then I have no control over them.
Or I don't know where/how to control them.
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Replying to
There are 256 and even 24-bit color palettes. You generally need to configure the applications using them. Most applications don't make use of it by default without explicitly configuring them to do it.
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getting emacs to use 24bit color requires two things:
1) terminfo entries for setab/setaf (gist.github.com/dylanwh/9029e6)
2) a version of ncurses that is new enough to understand those (so not the one that comes with macOS)
For me this meant using macports to install emacs...
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I only use my Mac for Chrome + ssh'ing to a Linux machine. Emacs only runs on Linux remotely.
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You probably do have both 256 and 24-bit color support, the issue is that you don't like it since it's allowing your Emacs theme to use more colors. I do think the best option is either switching to a 16 palette theme or using a matching theme for terminal + Emacs.
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If you really want to disable 256 / 24-bit color support you can use the terminfo decompile + recompile approach that I gave you though.
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Also worth noting that it's mostly just Vim and Emacs commonly using more than 16 colors. It's used by `ls` if you do `eval $(dircolors)` to mark different file extensions with different colors.