If you emailed me in the last few days and I haven…

If you emailed me in the last few days and I haven’t replied, please give me a bit more time.  Today I realized that Gmail forwarding for one of my main email accounts broke all by itself.  I found a whole lot of new messages in the mailbox, which I never check.  I’ve reconfigured my Gmail to use POP rather than a forwarding filter, and messages are being delivered to me now.  However the backlog will take me some time to process.  Sorry.

Fedora 18 features

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee has recently had a meeting where the upcoming Fedora 18 features were decided.  Out of the whole list, I am actually really looking forward to just one – 256 color terminals:

Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals, and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.
So let’s break through the artificial 8 color limit!

Also when preparing this page, while searching the net I noticed that Mac OS X Terminal’s default $TERM value is xterm-256color since Lion 10.7 That will ease some of the compatibility issues noted below.

You can see vim’s default appearance using the above expanded palette at:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/#256

Sure, the upgraded Perl and Python, Samba4 and Active Directory integration, FedFs and even the MATE Desktop (based on Gnome 2.x) are all cool.  But I don’t use any of them on a daily basis anymore.  Most of my needs have moved beyond desktop and straight into the browser.  But the colorful terminal still plays a major role in my daily routine, so I’m glad to see there will be an enhancement.

What’s your most expected feature?