Vim colors rendered incorrectly with TERM=xterm-kitty

[rnevius]

As above. Colors render correctly when manually setting TERM=xterm-256color, but incorrectly with TERM=xterm-kitty.

Kitty is a popular terminal emulator.

[sbeckeriv]

@rnevius how did you get it to run at all on kitty with TERM=xterm-kitty? I came here to open an issue. using TERM=xterm-256color does allow me to run it in kitty. I didnt test any colours yet.

kitty 0.17
asciinema 2.0.2

i get

✦ ❯ asciinema rec
asciinema: recording asciicast to /tmp/tmp0w9854hp-ascii.cast
asciinema: press <ctrl-d> or type "exit" when you're done
tput: unknown terminal "xterm-kitty"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/asciinema", line 11, in <module>
    load_entry_point('asciinema==2.0.2', 'console_scripts', 'asciinema')()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/asciinema/__main__.py", line 131, in main
    code = command.execute()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/asciinema/commands/record.py", line 69, in execute
    asciinema.record_asciicast(
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/asciinema/__init__.py", line 33, in record_asciicast
    w, h = term.get_size()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/asciinema/term.py", line 35, in get_size
    int(subprocess.check_output(['tput', 'cols'])),
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/subprocess.py", line 411, in check_output
    return run(*popenargs, stdout=PIPE, timeout=timeout, check=True,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/subprocess.py", line 512, in run
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, process.args,
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['tput', 'cols']' returned non-zero exit status 3.

[rnevius]

@sbeckeriv Have you set up terminfo for Kitty? What is the output of echo $TERMINFO?

[sbeckeriv]

@rnevius I have not! it is blank. I will look in to that. Thanks.

[ku1ik]

asciinema 2.1 removed dependency on tput (ncurses) which should solve the above crash.

[ku1ik]

Are you able to show the screenshots of the correct and incorrect vim colors you observe when recording with asciinema?

[EgZvor]

Here's an example cast with wrong colors in Vim

https://asciinema.org/a/580734

[EgZvor]

@sickill please, take a look at the above cast

[ku1ik]

I closed because of no response for over a year.

But yeah, your example @EgZvor shows something is off indeed. Thanks.

[EgZvor]

You might want to check out this thread vim/vim#11716 and this advice from Kovid https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#using-a-color-theme-with-a-background-color-does-not-work-well-in-vim (which I applied and is what breaks the highlighting in asciinema).

[ku1ik]

Thanks for the context. This actually explains a lot. I suspect the use of non-standard : instead of ; in color related escape sequences.

[kovidgoyal]

Thanks for the context. This actually explains a lot. I suspect the use of non-standard : instead of ; in color related escape sequences.

Note that colon is standard, from ECMA-48. semi-colon is non-standard but more common, IIRC konsole first started erroneously using semi-colon and it spread from there. Most modern terminal emulators support both forms. You should too.

To be didactic, the reason colon is used is because it encodes sub-parts of a single specification. SGR escape codes can actually contain multiple semi-colon separated parts (though this is rarely used in practice). In the presence of multiple parts separating sub-parts with semi-colons is ambiguous. Therefore, colons should always be used for sub-parts.

[ku1ik]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

We'll need to implement support for it in https://github.com/asciinema/avt

[ku1ik]

This has been fixed in 3.8.0 - https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player/releases/tag/v3.8.0