>> I think it's a "Mutt and S-Lang" thing. That is, Mutt uses S-Lang's
>> curses-emulation package, and S-Lang's curses emulation isn't the best,
>> so it ends up painting spaces all the way across the line when in color
>> mode.
Whether or not an escape sequence is used to clear to the end of a
line, or whether spaces are written to achieve the same effect is an
implementation detail. In fact, the purpose of a screen management
library is to minimize the number of characters that it sends in order
to manage the screen. This means that for some lines, it may be more
efficient to write one or two spaces rather than to send a
multi-character escape sequence.
[...]
>I just tried ncurses (4.2 under Linux) and it does the same thing. I'm
>using TERM=xterm-color and nxterm FWIW.
I think that it is an rxvt or xterm problem that at the very least
should be customizable. Here is a patch to screen.c in the rxvt
distribution:
--- screen.c~ Thu Jan 1 14:29:08 1998
+++ screen.c Tue Apr 20 15:59:25 1999
@@ -2621,7 +2621,7 @@
*str++ = *t++;
col = 0;
if (screen.text[row][TermWin.ncol] != WRAP_CHAR) {
-#if 0
+#if 1
for (; isspace(*--str);) ; /* strip trailing spaces anyway */
str++;
#endif
--
John E. Davis Center for Space Research/AXAF Science Center
617-258-8119 One Hampshire St., Building NE80-6019
http://space.mit.edu/~davis Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
