Hi i336_, I believe the problem lies not in the fact that there are only 256 values available in an "unsigned int" (an int is at least 16 bits wide). The point

Hi i336_, I believe the problem lies not in the fact that there are only 256 values available in an "unsigned int" (an int is at least 16 bits wide). The point is that ncurses requires to work with color pairs, which encode both the foreground and the background color in an index. This was made in order to preserve compatibility with some old HP terminals that were not able to set the two colors separately (using "setaf" and "setbf", like Tektronix terminals used to do). The problem with direct color is, if you have N colors, the number of pairs is N^2. When N=2^24, indexing pairs would require a variable of size 48 bits at last, but the current ncurses' ABI doesn't allow this. I believe that almost every modern terminal doesn't use paired colors anymore, but ncurses has always tried to provide compatibility with a wide set of terminals, and I understand their lack of enthusiasm in supporting this.