How do I determine if a terminal is color-capable?
- by asjo
I would like to change a program to automatically detect whether a terminal is color-capable or not, so when I run said program from within a non-color capable terminal (say M-x shell in (X)Emacs), color is automatically turned off.
I don't want to hardcode the program to detect TERM={emacs,dumb}.
I am thinking that termcap/terminfo should be able to help with this, but so far I've only managed to cobble together this (n)curses-using snippet of code, which fails badly when it can't find the terminal:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <curses.h>
int main(void) {
int colors=0;
initscr();
start_color();
colors=has_colors() ? 1 : 0;
endwin();
printf(colors ? "YES\n" : "NO\n");
exit(0);
}
I.e. I get this:
$ gcc -Wall -lncurses -o hep hep.c
$ echo $TERM
xterm
$ ./hep
YES
$ export TERM=dumb
$ ./hep
NO
$ export TERM=emacs
$ ./hep
Error opening terminal: emacs.
$
which is... suboptimal.
