Why does ncurses support only eight colors? If you've looked into the color palette available in curses, you may wonder why curses supports only eight colors. The curses.h include file defines these color macros: COLOR_BLACK COLOR_RED COLOR_GREEN COLOR_YELLOW COLOR_BLUE COLOR_MAGENTA COLOR_CYAN COLOR_WHITE But why only eight colors, and why these particular colors? At least with the Linux console, if you're running on a PC, the color range's origins are with the PC hardware.