Tools: Free Terminals Should Generate The 256-color Palette 2026

Terminals should generate the 256-color palette from the user's base16 theme.

If you've spent much time in the terminal, you've probably set a custom base16 theme. They work well. You define a handful of colors in one place and all your programs use them.

The drawback is that 16 colors is limiting. Complex and color-heavy programs struggle with such a small palette.

The mainstream solution is to use truecolor and gain access to 16 million colors. But there are drawbacks:

The 256-color palette sits in the middle with more range than base16 and less overhead than truecolor. But it has its own issues:

The solution is to generate the extended palette from your existing base16 colors. You keep the simplicity of theming in one place while gaining access to many more colors.

If terminals did this automatically then terminal program maintainers would consider the 256-color palette a viable choice, allowing them to use a more expressive color range without requiring added complexity or configuration files.

The 256-color palette has a specific layout. If you are already familiar with it, you can skip to the next section.

The first 16 colors form the base16 palette. It contains black, white, and all primary and secondary colors, each with normal and bright variants.

The next 216 colors form a 6x6x6 color cube. It works like 24-bit RGB but with 6 shades per channel instead of 256.

Source: HackerNews