Troubleshooting

Terminal Color Support

Fresh automatically detects your terminal's color capability and converts theme colors accordingly.

Color Modes

• Truecolor (24-bit): Full RGB color support. Used by modern terminals (Kitty, Alacritty, iTerm2).
• 256 colors: Extended palette. Used by xterm-256color and similar.
• 16 colors: Basic ANSI colors. Used by the Linux console.

Terminal Multiplexers

GNU Screen and tmux can affect color rendering:

• GNU Screen: Does not support truecolor. Fresh uses 256 colors.
• tmux: Supports 256 colors by default; some configs support truecolor with TERM=tmux-direct.

Manual Override

If colors look wrong, you can force a specific color mode with the FRESH_COLOR_MODE environment variable:

# Force 256-color mode (recommended for GNU Screen)
FRESH_COLOR_MODE=256 fresh

# Force 16-color mode
FRESH_COLOR_MODE=16 fresh

# Force truecolor (if auto-detection is wrong)
FRESH_COLOR_MODE=truecolor fresh

Common Issues

Symptom	Likely Cause	Solution
Colors look completely wrong	Truecolor detected but not supported	Use FRESH_COLOR_MODE=256
Weird artifacts/rendering issues	Terminal multiplexer interference	Try FRESH_COLOR_MODE=256 or check TERM
Very limited/ugly colors	16-color mode detected	Check your terminal supports 256 colors