On Tue, 21 May 2002, Andy Saxena wrote: > > generally it _cannot_ detect whether the background is light or dark. > > Hmmm... so what would the solution be in this case? Should I always use > a dark background? I guess if I had to choose between a dark and a light > background, I'd be more inclined to use a dark background. How would I > tell mutt that the background will always be dark?
My impression is that curses applications used to be able to assume that the background is dark. (vt100's running with a light background were fine for short periods of time, but led to eyestrain). At some point the assumption changed - some people claim that xterm was "always" a light background. (I don't recall it that way, have used xterm since around '88 or '89). Anyway, the assumption tends to be built into programs that setting text color is a good thing, and setting the background color is to be avoided. That assumption has been changing over the past few years. > Is there any way to switch between the colors for dark and light > backgrounds while in the application? I seem to recall that vim does this. I use vile, which does something analogous - allows switching between user-defined palettes (so while I can discuss the concepts nicely, I'd have to go & lookup exactly what command vim accepts to implement this ;-). -- T.E.Dickey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net
