[chadaustin]

You're right: I should have included COLORTERM in this history, and a couple of the other fits and starts, like the `RGB` terminfo capability.

The issue I had with COLORTERM is that not every program respects it. In fact, I've had this in my .bashrc for a while:

  case $TERM in
    linux | screen*)
      unset COLORTERM
      ;;
    *)
      export COLORTERM=truecolor
      ;;
  esac

(Screen does support 24-bit color now, so that case probably came from Ubuntu 18.)

[csdvrx]

Agreed - COLORTERM has its own problem. I prefer your approach, it looks very sound!

A fork of terminfo may be needed if the description of modern terminal capabilities can't be added -- or if old and deprecated attributes repurposed for that job (like in your padding example): if you're automating the correction/creation of terminfos in ~/, IMHO, it may be better to piggyback on tic as much as possible.

Anyway, to backport modern terminal descriptions to legacy programs, creating correct binary terminfos in ~/.terminfo seems the best practice. You can also invent new TERM. When I wanted to have italics etc about everywhere, personally that's just what I did for sixel-tmux: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/?tab=readme-ov-file#ste... : just declare a new $TERM you know to be right, and use that in the apps that let you use a little logic in their configuration file

I do that in my .vimrc:

   " If Vim doesn't know the escape codes to switch to italic
   let &t_ZH="\e[3m"
   let &t_ZR="\e[23m"
   " Italics pseudo-auto toggle: force italics if we recognize it's supported from TERM
   if match($TERM, "xterm-256color-italic")==0
    highlight Comment cterm=italic
   endif

BTW you should package your emacs config file with the emacs APE from https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/emacs to do a cuteemacs, to carry your config files and everything in a portable binary: https://github.com/csdvrx/CuteVim

Another idea: have you considered that the "program that would be run by .bashrc" to generate the "unambiguous 24-bit color capabilities" could set environment variables to communicate them? Like, if you can't stuff them in terminfo, stuff them in environment variables! Env var work well on Windows, and the configuration files of terminal programs could just use these when available to override.

It's be like adding friends to your proposed TERMVERSION: TERMSETF24 etc where you've have a finer control than COLORTERM