On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 01:48:03PM -0700, Paul E Condon wrote: > There is, new to me, a new feature in Aptitude. Some time in the past > within the past 18 months, I lost the ability to adjust the colors on > the text display. Now all I get is a white letters on a black > background. I get this in both gnome-terminal and in Xfce terminal. > Both terminal emulators are configured to display black letters on > white back. In both, when I type the command, aptitude, the screen > flips, apparently as part of aptitude initialization. Where is this > behavior configured? I want to change it.
There doesn't appear to be anywhere to configure colours in aptitude (at least, not in the options), so it may be that ncurses is degrading the display due to your terminal type. AIUI, an application tells ncurses that it wants to draw a box here, or put some text there, or change to that colour background. Ncurses then converts that into command sequences appropriate to the terminal type (for example, if it's a 256color terminal, then all those colours are available, if it's 8color then the colour needs to be mapped to one of those available. Similarly some terminal support "clear to end of line", some support titles and so on). Check the value of $TERM (echo $TERM) and see if it looks sensible (there should be a matching file somewhere under /usr/share/terminfo. To try out another terminal type temporarily, you can do "TERM=xterm aptitude" to apply the change of variable to just the one command.
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