Eric d'Halibut wrote: > I have a gnome-terminal profile configured with a black background. > However, running mutt in it changes the background to gray, a much > lower contrast situation. In all the other terminals I have tried > (xterm, rxvt, urxvt), black stays black in mutt. (This > background-goes-gray also happens with midnight commander, if anyone > besides me is still running it!)
Many terminal programs such as mutt use the "alternate screen". They initialize the terminal and switch to the alternate screen when redrawing the full text window. Upon exit they switch back to the primary screen. This is a feature done because people want it. They want to be able to have commands typed on the command line on the display. They start the terminal program, which redraws everything, then exit and want to return to seeing the previous commands on the screen. (Those that don't want it can always disable alternate screen switching.) Without using the alternate screen the previous contents are lost. You can try the difference by using 'less -X' as a temporary test of what is happening. Look at the difference in the screen after these sets of commands. $ echo hello $ less ~/.bashrc ...after exit screen returns to show the echo hello command... $ echo hello $ less -X ~/.bashrc ...exit the contents of the file have consumed the screen and the previous contents of the display are lost... This behavior is why this is happening with both mutt and mc. Try less. Is it happening with less too? I think it should be. With this above behavior in mind it seems to me that gnome-terminal has a different color for the alternate screen. Which means that there should be some way to configure it so that the alternate screen also has the colors that you desire. I don't use gnome-terminal and so do not know about its configuration. But perhaps the above information will be enough for you to find the right configuration for it. Bob
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