Powerlevel9k: The solution suggested for the terminal color warning is not clear

[elezar]

When starting a terminal with powerlevel9k as the theme, the following warning is issued:

WARNING! Your terminal supports less than 256 colors!
You should put: export TERM="xterm-256color" in your ~/.zshrc

Looking into the theme source, I see the following:

 # Display a warning if the terminal does not support 256 colors
  local term_colors
  term_colors=$(tput colors)
  if (( term_colors < 256 )); then
    print -P "%F{red}WARNING!%f Your terminal supports less than 256 colors!"
    print -P "You should put: %F{blue}export TERM=\"xterm-256color\"%f in your \~\/.zshrc"
  fi

When running tput colors in the terminal I get 8.

I added export TERM="xterm-256color" to my .zshrc and then tput colors returns 256, but the warning is still issued.

I am running Ubuntu 14.04, and the message occurs in all my terminal emulators.

On another machine, where I am running with d75cdf34d52f02dd49e81f9c693ca4277f92e27e, I do not see the message (as no check is implemented there).

[elezar]

The problem was that I added export TERM="xterm-256color" at the end of my .zshrc file, but this needs to be set BEFORE oh-my-zsh is sourced.

The message displayed could be clearer.

[bh]

Same here, fixed it with:

~/.zshenv

...
export TERM="xterm-256color"
...

[bhilburn]

@elezar - Great catch! Would you like to submit a PR to get commit credit?

[elezar]

Sure. I will do so as soon as I get to the office this morning!

[elezar]

Looking into this a bit, and seeing that there are a number of options for installing powerlevel9k, I don't know if simply adjusting the message is enough.

Would it not be better to add more info on the installation section?

I am trying to get the vagrant box running so that I can test the other options.

Is there a reason for not just adding the export to the theme file itself?

[dritter]

@elezar Yep, there are several problems with the warning:

• You are right, the TERM variable must be defined before the theme is called
• Setting TERM="xterm-256color" isn't always the right thing. Some people have other terminals and have to set a different value for that. That is also the reason why we can't just set it in the theme itself. Have a look at #30 for further informations.

I am afraid, all we can do is to rephrase that warning (maybe with a link to the wiki).

[bhilburn]

Fixed by 8dfca40.

[mikail-khan]

I just installed powerlevel9k and did a vanilla install on my Arch Linux system. I activate the theme in my zshrc via the following command:

source /usr/share/zsh-theme-powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k.zsh-theme

All was fine until I add the following line above

source /usr/share/zsh/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

Then when I sourced my .zshrc file I started getting the term warning message. I followed the instructions to add the export statement at the top of the zshrc file but it makes no difference. It still gives me the warning. I could go into the theme and rip out that bit of the theme code which generates this warning but I would really like to know why it is happening and why the proposed fix does not work.

[Cypher1]

I just started getting this warning as well (even with the environment variable the warning suggests set).
I had to use the workaround that 9K suggests, but that did silence the warning (would prefer to fix the issue though).

POWERLEVEL9K_IGNORE_TERM_COLORS=true

[romkatv]

@Cypher1 Could you check whether you'll get the same warning with Powerlevel10k?

[Cypher1]

Ah, sorry I just remembered that I switched from 9k to 10k recently.

Sorry if this is a 10k specific issue.

On Wed., 8 May 2019, 7:34 pm Roman Perepelitsa, [e-mail]
wrote:

@Cypher1 https://github.com/Cypher1 Could you check whether you'll get
the same warning with Powerlevel10k
https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k/blob/master/README.md#for-powerlevel9k-users
?

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[romkatv]

@Cypher1 If you see the warning with the latest version of Powerlevel10k (use git pull to update it), please open an issue against Powerlevel10k: https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k/issues/new. Copy-paste the following commands into your terminal and attach a screenshot of the output.

echo "\$ZSH_VERSION=${(q)ZSH_VERSION}"
echo "\$TERM=${(q)TERM}"
echo "\$(tput colors)=$(tput colors 2>/dev/null)"
echo "\$(echotc Co)=$(echotc Co 2>/dev/null)"
echo "terminfo[colors]=${(q)terminfo[colors]}"
for ((i = 0; i != 256; ++i)); do print -Pn "%F{$i}\u2588%f"; done

[Cypher1]

Thanks can confirm that it is fixed in the latest. Sorry for the slow reply.