Color Schemes

[mwoehlke]

Richard Lynch (Contractor) wrote:
> I'm starting cygwin from the Start menu that cygwin installed, which windows
> 'properties' show as mapped to:
> C:\cygwin\cygwin.bat  
> 
> I used the 'Properties' in that window to get the scheme I wanted, and
> applied to the thingie that launched this shell.
> 
> I've also modified the 'properties' from the Start menu item directly, and
> clicked on the pretty color icons instead of typing the digits, as suggested.

Um, wait, I suggested doing the exact *opposite*. I thought that maybe 
you could change the mappings so that things asking for black would get 
white, vice versa, and so on. However, you have to be careful to 
re-select the original "pretty color icon" when you are done, or things 
that don't ask get what you had selected. This leads to things like a 
'1;37' background with '1;37' text, which, as you noticed, makes for 
'invisible ink'.

What I think you want to do is tell the CUI that '0;30' should be 
'255,255,255', '1;37' should be '0,0,0', etc, so that you will have 
something that is legible in all circumstances (unless something is 
asking for the same foreground and background, in which case you were 
screwed even before you started tinkering - but I haven't seen any 
Cygwin programs with that problem).

> It "works", even on launching another, in that I can change the color scheme
> of the bash shell any way I like, but it has no effect I can tell on the ANSI
> colors of termcap which define 'less' behaviour, nor the LS_COLORS that
> define 'ls' behaviour.

If you change the numbers as I mentioned, then anything asking for e.g. 
'1;31' will show up as whatever you changed 'bright red' to be.

> My 'man man' output now looks like this:
> 
> -------------------
>  man - format and display the on-line manual pages
> 
>  man [            ] [      ] [   system] [   string] [   config_file] [
> pathlist] [   pager] [   section_list] [section] name ...
> -------------------
> 
> Note that all the things that 'less' would reverse-video are effectively
> "invisible"

This implies that you have somehow set the default background color to 
'1;37'. Less is then displaying text as '1;37'. I don't think you can 
change less without hacking it, but I don't think you want to; if you go 
this route, you'll be chasing down this issue in dozens of programs.

> Editing /etc/termcap by hand, however, is way beyond my skill level, and I
> been doing this stuff for a couple decades...

I am not sure what you would accomplish by editing termcap; I don't 
think termcap has any control over this (except maybe you could disable 
text attributes entirely, but I'm not sure what the point would be... 
and just setting TERM to something like maybe 'dumb' would take care of 
that).

-- 
Matthew
Now where did I put my hippo?


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