How do you apply a Emacs custom color theme in console mode?

Question

When I load a custom color scheme (through M-x load-theme or M-x customize-theme) the results only seem to be applied when Emacs runs in a separate window:

But when Emacs is run in a terminal with -nw, the default colors seem to be used:

_{(source: raghav at www.ocf.berkeley.edu)}

I'm new to Emacs, so I don't know if this is expected behavior -- but it doesn't seem to be, since Googling turns up several people discussing using color themes in console mode. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I am very late, but I had the same problem and I solved it adding the following line to my ~/.zshrc

export TERM=xterm-256color

If you are not using zsh (for example you are using bash), you must add it on your right console init file (for example ~/.bashrc)

Answer 2

Using the following in ~/.Xresources seems to get rid of the blue background that comes after exporting TERM=xterm-256color:

emacs*Background: #002b36
emacs*Foreground: #839496

Answer 3

See this question: How to make Emacs terminal colors the same as Emacs GUI colors?

The theme in your console looks quite close to the one in the GUI, so my bet is that you will have to live with it -- or use the GUI.