When using less in OS X, how can I customize the colors with with things are displayed? When I run less within an ansi-term in Emacs the colors don't come out nicely.$ less --versionless 418Copyright (C) 1984-2007 Mark Nudelman
Customizing less colors
emacs;colors;less;color management
For OSX, this refers to Emacs 22.1.1; Fedora with Emacs 24 has the same behavior.Emac's ansi-term supports 8 colors.  That is all that ANSI specified, and ansi-term is named appropriately.  The eterm-color terminal description in ncurses is used for this terminal type.  Emacs sets TERM to this value (see source):(defvar term-term-name eterm-color  Name to use for TERM.Using \emacs\ loses, because bash disables editing if $TERM == emacs.)If you override TERM, e.g., to tell applications that it has more colors, then the extra colors will not be used.  Likewise, hard-coded applications which ignore the terminal database cannot use extra colors either.While Emacs can use more than 8 colors in a terminal, ansi-term does not.  Reading the source, look for term-ansi-current-color, and see that there is only logic for 30-37, 39, 40-47 and 49:   ;; Foreground   ((and (>= parameter 30) (<= parameter 37))    (setq term-ansi-current-color (- parameter 29)))   ;; Reset foreground   ((eq parameter 39)    (setq term-ansi-current-color 0))   ;; Background   ((and (>= parameter 40) (<= parameter 47))    (setq term-ansi-current-bg-color (- parameter 39)))   ;; Reset background   ((eq parameter 49)    (setq term-ansi-current-bg-color 0))You may be able to change the palette of colors used by your terminal, but there is no way to make ansi-term differ from that (it will use the first 8 colors even if Emacs can use 256).Further reading:AnsiTerm (Emacs wiki)AnsiTermHints (Emacs wiki)For Emacs other than ansi-term:How to make Emacs terminal colors the same as Emacs GUI colors?How do you apply a Emacs custom color theme in console mode?Also:term.el (Emacs source code for ansi-term)ansi-color.el (Emacs source code)term/tty-colors.el (Emacs source code)term/xterm.el (Emacs source code)