Color themes are strange/incorrect in terminal emu

Question

I'm running emacs-nox 23.3 in Konsole (from kde) emulator, the most color themes have strange colors.

For example, i like the Solarized Theme. I expect the theme should look like this:

Solarized Theme http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-ruby-dark.png

However, this is what I get:

Broken Solarized Theme http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/3881/voronoi2.png

Most of themes that comes in emacs-color-theme package have similar behavior. I tried to change the Konsole color settings - no result. I also tried to replace my .Xresources with this one, with no success.

Answer 1

You need 256 colors in your terminal for most color themes to have decent appearance. Try adding this to your .bashrc (or .zshrc):

TERM=xterm-256color

After you've sourced the setting (source .bashrc), start again emacs and hopefully the themes will be looking much better.

Answer 2

No, do not put this line

TERM=xterm-256color

to .Xresources. Try to run emacs with this command:

TERM=xterm-256color emacs

and if everything is ok, put this line to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file:

alias emacs='TERM=xterm-256color emacs'

After that your can execute emacs with usual 'emacs' cmd and get the normal colors in editor.