How to make alacritty display true color

Question

For some reason, my alacritty install is not using the colors specified in the config file.

Here is the relevan section of my config.

env:
  TERM: alacritty

colors:
  primary:
    background: '#1c1f26'
    foreground: '#d8dee9'
    dim_foreground: '#a5abb6'
    cursor:
      text: '#2e3440'
      cursor: '#d8dee9'
    vi_mode_cursor:
      text: '#2e3440'
      cursor: '#d8dee9'
    selection:
      text: CellForeground
      background: '#4c566a'
    search:
      matches:
        foreground: CellBackground
        background: '#88c0d0'
      bar:
        background: '#434c5e'
        foreground: '#d8dee9'
    normal:
      black: '#3b4252'
      red: '#bf616a'
      green: '#a3be8c'
      yellow: '#ebcb8b'
      blue: '#81a1c1'
      magenta: '#b48ead'
      cyan: '#88c0d0'
      white: '#e5e9f0'
    bright:
      black: '#4c566a'
      red: '#bf616a'
      green: '#a3be8c'
      yellow: '#ebcb8b'
      blue: '#81a1c1'
      magenta: '#b48ead'
      cyan: '#8fbcbb'
      white: '#eceff4'
    dim:
      black: '#373e4d'
      red: '#94545d'
      green: '#809575'
      yellow: '#b29e75'
      blue: '#68809a'
      magenta: '#8c738c'
      cyan: '#6d96a5'
      white: '#aeb3bb'

The colors section is pretty much taken exactly from nord color scheme, except for the background color which I have made a bit darker.

However, when I test the color used for the 16 base colors (using the escape) sequences like so:

printf "\033[0;32m_hello_\033[0m\n"    #to display "_hello_" in the color green

I get a color that is not present anywhere in any config of mine

I'm trying to determine the actual color displayed by using the colorpicker^AUR package like so:

colorpicker --short --one-shot --preview

The displayed colors are completely different from the ones specified in the config. For example:

• For green instead of #a3be8c, I get #b5bd68
• For red instead of #bf616a, I get #cc6666

As far as I can tell there is no clear relationship between the expected and actual colors. Maybe there is some color approximation going on, I'm not sure.

What am I doing wrong here? If this is an approximation issue, how do I make alacritty use truecolor?

---

Edit: Chaging TERM to xterm-256color doesn't fix the problem

Answer 1

I think the problem is your indentation: You have normal/bright/dim indented past primary, but those need to be at the same indentation level as primary.