Once upon a time, having a colored terminal displaying whole eight different colors was subject to the geeks amongst all the terminal users. Nowadays, this is nothing special anymore. Consequently, one has to go further: 256 colours!

Compile with support for 256 colours (–enable-256-color), then make sure $TERM is set correctly:

.Xresources

URxvt.termName: rxvt-256color

Clone dircolors-solarized.git:

# git clone https://github.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized.git

Copy one of the dircolors.* files to ~/.dir_colors and add the following to the shell's init script (if not already provided by the distribution's global one:

eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dir_colors)

Just add the following to ~/.vimrc:

.vimrc

set t_Co=256

Optionally search for a nice colorscheme supporting 256 colors (default was fine for me).

This depends on the value of $TERM at the time screen is started - rxvt-256color is fine. Or maybe not? In doubt, one may override it:

.screenrc

term xterm-256color

Compile with slang support (–with-slang). Maybe not necessary, but certainly useful.

Mutt's colors are subject to customisation anyway, but here's a nice sample: https://github.com/altercation/mutt-colors-solarized/blob/master/mutt-colors-solarized-dark-256.muttrc

This script is useful:

256-colors.sh

#!/bin/bash
 
# This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
# the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
# and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
# To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
# http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details.
 
for fgbg in 38 48 ; do #Foreground/Background
	for color in {0..256} ; do #Colors
		#Display the color
		echo -en "\e[${fgbg};5;${color}m ${color}\t\e[0m"
		#Display 10 colors per lines
		if [ $((($color + 1) % 10)) == 0 ] ; then
			echo #New line
		fi
	done
	echo #New line
done
 
exit 0

This one is also nice, found on Github and customized to get default parameter from tput output:

show-ansi-colors.sh

#!/bin/bash
 
ncolors=${1:-$(tput colors)}
 
echo "showing $ncolors ansi colors:"
for ((n = 0; n < $ncolors; n++)); do
        printf " [$n] $(tput setaf $n)"
        printf "wMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMwMw"
        printf "$(tput sgr0)\n"
done