Subject: Re: WSCONS color question
To: Justin <justin@secureshell.com>
From: Matthias Drochner <drochner@zel459.zel.kfa-juelich.de>
List: current-users
Date: 03/17/1999 20:38:56
justin@secureshell.com said:
> Will the console now have 'full' extended ansi color support for the
> console similar to a linux/freebsd color console?

There is support for 16 colors in the vt100 emulator and
the VGA device driver.

> in the past, the PCVT has been limited to only
> the lower half of the ansi color codes and I am wondering if this limitation
> has been lifted for WSCONS.

This limitation was for a reason: VGA allows to chose the
meaning of one attribute bit to be either the fourth bit of color
selection or to select from 2 character sets (or both, but this
is nonsense normally).
A VT100 emulation which wants to display all the DEC special
graphics and so can't do this with only 256 characters, so
pcvt has chosen to sacrifice half of the color space.

The vga driver for wscons allows to choose - there is an
"80x25" screen type with 16 colors and 256 characters, and
an "80x25bf" ("big font") type with 8 colors and 512 characters.
The former is default, but you can choose the latter for
better ASCII art support (per screen). (which makes only sense
if you load a font containing the missing VT100 characters and
if the kernel actually understands the font mapping)

best regards
Matthias