In the Mutt manual: foreground can optionally be prefixed with the keyword bright to make the foreground color boldfaced (e.g., brightred).
That's the way to do with xterm, where boldfaced mode is a way to get bright colors, but in GNOME Terminal, this does bold + bright colors. IMHO, one should just get bright colors in GNOME Terminal (without bold), or at least this should be configurable. For instance, in xterm, one uses tput bold; tput setaf 3; echo abcdef but in GNOME Terminal, one uses tput setaf 11; echo abcdef I assume that the reason is that xterm just has 8 colors: $ tput colors 8 thus it has to emulate the bright colors with the bold attribute. Now, the issue is the following in color.c: if (is_bright) { if (is_fg) { *attr |= A_BOLD; } else if (COLORS < 16) { /* A_BLINK turns the background color brite on some terms */ *attr |= A_BLINK; } else { /* Advance the color by 8 to get the bright version */ *col += 8; } } I think that if (is_fg) should be replaced by if (is_fg && COLORS < 16) Or in the following, equivalent way: if (is_bright) { if (COLORS >= 16) { /* Advance the color by 8 to get the bright version */ *col += 8; } else if (is_fg) { *attr |= A_BOLD; } else { /* A_BLINK turns the background color brite on some terms */ *attr |= A_BLINK; } } Not tried yet, I need some sleep. Note: Some users might not like this (i.e. they would like bold + bright), in which case one could introduce "boldbright" colors (and also maybe "bold" colors). In 8-color terminals, "bold", "bright" and "boldbright" colors would be equivalent (they would just set A_BOLD). -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)