Is there support for 256 colors on the integrated terminal for Windows?

[rfgamaral]

I have configured ZSH as integrated terminal on my VS Code instance on Windows. Like this:

"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\zsh.exe",
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": [
    "-lic",
    "cd $OLDPWD; exec zsh"
]

This is working, but colors are not that great. It seems that only 8 are supported.

Here's ZSH running on Mintty (it also comes from Cygwin, no extra setup):

And here's VS Code integrated terminal configured as mentioned above:

I have run set TERM=xterm on VS Conde before running the spectrum_ls command (which prints all the colors). I've also tried set TERM=xterm-256colors but it didn't work either.

Am I missing something?

[Tyriar]

Hmm, works fine on Linux:

Can you try running this so I know what is being run?

for fgbg in 38 48 ; do #Foreground/Background
  for color in {0..256} ; do #Colors
    #Display the color
    echo -en "\e[${fgbg};5;${color}m ${color}\t\e[0m"
    #Display 10 colors per lines
    if [ $((($color + 1) % 10)) == 0 ] ; then
      echo #New line
    fi
  done
  echo #New line
done

[rfgamaral]

Here you go:

[Tyriar]

Thanks I can repro, it's likely an upstream issue on Windows.

[rfgamaral]

Meaning a fix will probably take a while?

[Tyriar]

Created an upstream issue, we'll see what the response is rprichard/winpty#108

[rfgamaral]

@Tyriar I'm not sure if this issue is related but... I've updated my integrated terminal to this configuration (slight change):

"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Cygwin64\\bin\\bash.exe",
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": [
    "/bin/xhere",
    "/bin/zsh"
]

And I'm using the Oh My Zsh agnoster theme. Thing is, the integrated terminal doesn't even render a black background properly:

The first prompt segment (the one my username@host) should have a black background as you can see from the next segment transition (the > symbol). For some reason, in that first prompt segment, the black background is actual "transparent".

Is this related or a different issue? Or not at all a VS code issue?

[Tyriar]

@rfgamaral this is an upstream problem, we just render what's given back from winpty rprichard/winpty#108

[adalinesimonian]

Based on the discussion in rprichard/winpty#108, does it make sense for VSCode to use wslbridge directly, or is it better to work on implementing support in winpty for "Cygwin/MSYS2/WSL" as mentioned in rprichard/winpty#108 (comment)?

[Tyriar]

Closing in favor of the upstream issue, our team doesn't plan on investing in this area.