the --24-bit-color option is unusable from .gitconfig

% git config --global delta.24-bit-color yes
error: invalid key: delta.24-bit-color

OTOH,

% git config --global delta.true-color yes

Manually editing ~/.gitconfig didn't help either:

[delta]
    24-bit-color = yes

% git log
fatal: bad config line 18 in file /home/redacted/.gitconfig

Seems like git doesn't accept keys that start with a digit.

[Kr1ss-XD]

FWIW I'm using a workaround for this issue. It's possible to set e.g.

[core]
	pager	= delta --24-bit-color=always

instead. Hope this helps, cheers !

[dandavison]

Hi @lepotic, @Kr1ss-XD, hm, yes given the importance of gitconfig to delta perhaps (as you suggest) we should create an alias for this option which was poorly named in retrospect (I think it came before gitconfig support FWIW).

[Kr1ss-XD]

[...] we should create an alias [...]

@dandavison @lepotic what about --true-color=[always|auto|never] then ?

[dandavison]

@dandavison @lepotic what about --true-color=[always|auto|never] then ?

Done. #571 24-bit-color is now marked as deprecated in --help. If true-color is at its default value, and you supply a differing value for 24-bit-color, then that will take effect.

[dandavison]

By the way, are your terminal emulators not setting COLORTERM? Delta will automatically support 24-bit color without having to use --true-color, as long as our terminal emulators are advertizing their capability via COLORTERM=truecolor or COLORTERM=24bit. Seeing as other applications may respond to this, it might be a better solution to set that env var than to put delta into always mode.

By the way, are your terminal emulators not setting COLORTERM? @dandavison

Mine didn't (st). I had to set it myself.

There seems to be a way of querying the terminal capabilities, described in https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728#querying-the-terminal (You probably know this gist, but anyway.)

[Kr1ss-XD]

Thx @dandavison !

In regards to $COLORTERM, I've noticed that some terminal emulators don't set this, despite being 24-bit capable. Examples are xterm and wezterm, while xfce4-terminal, kitty and alacritty correctly set the variable to truecolor.

Tmux, if I recall this correctly, needs to be configured to take advantage of true color. If it is, it does set $COLORTERM though, even when run inside xterm or wezterm.

Long story short, it might make sense to use delta's flag anyways, when using multiple terminal emulators.