"Unsupported theme: theme requires true color support"

[sgon00]

Actually there are two problems related to true color support.

1. I am using helix in a ssh session (both client and server are running debian). When I try to change the theme, it will report this error message: "Unsupported theme: theme requires true color support"

2. When I use helix in the screen app, the color is also not working. This happens in both ssh session and my local system. But the behaviors are different. It might because of different helix versions. In a ssh session, helix 23.05 will report "Unsupported theme: theme requires true color support". In local system, helix 22.12 will simply mess up the color and entire screen becomes blue.

[pascalkuthe]

You can forcefully enable true color setting the true-color config option to true. Gnu screen might not support true-colors properly

[sgon00]

Thanks for the tip. After enabling true-color to true, ssh session works.
But gnu screen still does NOT work.

[sgon00]

I marked this as the answer because all the problems are caused by gnu screen. I switched to zellij and problem solved.

[gyreas]

one trick is to export COLORTERM=truecolor somehow before loading helix, perhaps in your .bashrc

[casperdcl]

Just for completeness/reference: https://docs.helix-editor.com/editor.html#editor-section

hx ~/.config/helix/config.toml

[editor]
true-color = true

[eminence]

I believe you can also set the environment variable COLORTERM=truecolor (at least this worked for me)

[lukepighetti]

Is there a list of themes that don't require truecolor?

[the-mikedavis]

The base16_ themes and term16_ themes shouldn't require true-color. Any theme that uses basic ANSI colors like light-blue, yellow, etc. and not custom colors (e.g. #ff0000) can be used without true-color support:

helix/helix-view/src/theme.rs

Lines 350 to 356 in fc97ecc

	pub fn is_16_color(&self) -> bool {
	self.styles.iter().all(|(_, style)| {
	[style.fg, style.bg]
	.into_iter()
	.all(|color| !matches!(color, Some(Color::Rgb(..))))
	})
	}

[dawkrish]

It looks like some of the base_16 requires true-color