Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.

TL;DR: Explanation of why the escape sequence for 256 color and 24 bit color modes are weird and can vary. \E[38:5:​_n_​m is technically the correct form for 256 color, but \E[38;5;​_n_​m is the form terminals more widely support.

I saw this on Hacker News today, and found the article interesting because I’d recently seen a Terminal Guide page on 256 color that mentioned how terminals support different versions of the codes (with semicolons being the most compatible). Semi-relatedly there’s XTerm’s criticism of Gnome Terminal and VTE (which is talks about compatibility in general).