Why do we have max. 256 colors in terminal emulators? [closed]

Question

I was just fiddling around with a 256 color VIM theme and noticed that 256 colors are just not enough sometimes. I would love a terminal that supports at least the HTML color range from #000000 to #FFFFFF (65536 colors).

So i asked myself...

• Is there a good reason why there is no terminal emulator with more than 256 colors?

• Or am i missing out on one and somebody already built one?

Answer 1

It's because that's how many colors you could encode in a single byte. Not only that, actually most terminals only had 16 colors (using only 4 of the 8 bits) the other 4 bits were flags used to indicate some thing to do with a character. Most common flags were: highlight, underline, blinking and reverse; (or some other terminal capability)