"Bold is bright" vs. 256-color escape sequences
With the no-longer-default behavior "bold is bright":
vte, xterm <= 330:
echo -e '\e[1;31mfoo\e[m'
-> bold and bright
echo -e '\e[1;38:5:1mfoo\e[m'
-> bold only
xterm >= 331:
echo -e '\e[1;31mfoo\e[m'
-> bold and bright
echo -e '\e[1;38:5:1mfoo\e[m'
-> bold and bright
There are changes related to 256-color handling mentioned in xterm's changelog, but not this one. So I'm wondering if this was an intended change or is a new bug.
The new behavior is cleaner in the sense that it's immune to whether terminfo maps the first 8 indices to the old or the 256-color sequences. It would also be simpler to implement in VTE since we wouldn't have to distinguish 256+16 palette colors, we could map the legacy 8/16-color escape sequences into the 256-color palette straight away and only distinguish 256 palette entries.
The old behavior is better in the sense that it allows (non-ncurses) applications to pick dark palette colors and make them bold (even if the compatibility option "bold is bright" is enabled), while this is impossible with the new behavior.
I'm just filing this as an FYI. I don't think I want to change VTE's behavior.