Emacs seems to use the 16 colors which were defined in a color scheme inside the terminal emulator as default.
This works well, I would not want to switch to a whole emacs color profile. E.g I can specify the color of a "component" in emacs with a fixed color name or value like so:
(set-face-background 'mode-line "purple")
Is it also possible to tell Emacs to use one of the 16 defaults for this? like "color01" or sth.?
If you run emacs -nw, you can list all valid color names that can be used in the terminal. Here's an extract from M-x list-colors-display:
black #000000
red #cd0000
green #00cd00
yellow #cdcd00
blue #0000ee
magenta #cd00cd
cyan #00cdcd
white #e5e5e5
brightblack #7f7f7f
brightred #ff0000
brightgreen #00ff00
brightyellow #ffff00
brightblue #5c5cff
brightmagenta #ff00ff
brightcyan #00ffff
brightwhite #ffffff
color-16 #000000
... ...
color-255 #eeeeee
As you can see, for some reason only colors 16 to 255 are numbered. Colors 0 to 15 use some take on the standard names of the 16-color terminal palette. To make use of them, use the identifiers above when customizing a theme.
If you're not in a terminal emulator, but would like to use its colors in a GUI Emacs, try the xresources-theme.
