Re: after dist-upgrade mutt in reverse video

[Richard Otte <otte@ucsc.edu>]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 10:57:20PM -0600, s. keeling wrote:
> Incoming from Ric Otte:
> > 
> > I am running a testing machine and just did a dist-upgrade.  This
> > time when I start Mutt from the menus, it shows up in reverse
> > video.  Before it looked as if it was being run from rxvt, which
> > is not in reverse video. Now it looks as if it is being run in
> > xterm, which also starts in reverse video from the pulldown menu.
> > I have looked around
> 
> What do you mean by "reverse video?"  Having come from the old days,
> blak on white is reverse for me.  ymmv.
> 
> As mutt colors are somewhat controlled by s-lang, you can also
> fiddle with the environment variable COLORFGBG (as in:
> 
>    export COLORFGBG='lightgray\;black'
> 
> (or whatever you prefer) in your ~/.bash_profile.
> 
> Assuming mutt starts up in the same way as an xterm starts up, you
> likely need to tweak your Xresources for Xterm, however be advised
> that any menu command that explicitly sets foreground and background
> colors will override resource settings.  Here's a few you can play
> with:
> 
> *Rxvt*background:           black *Rxvt*cursorColor:          green
> Rxvt.font:                  fixed *Rxvt*foreground:           wheat
> Rxvt.geometry:              97x43 *Rxvt*loginShell:           true
> *Rxvt*saveLines:            2000 Rxvt.scrollBar_right:       false
> *Rxvt*scrollBar:            true *Rxvt*visualBell:           true
> Rxvt.geometry:              97x43
> 
> XTerm*geometry:             97x43 xterm*background:       black
> XTerm*font:                 fixed xterm*SaveLines: 2000
> xterm*VisualBell: true XTerm*VT100*background:     black
> XTerm*VT100*cursorColor:    green XTerm*VT100*font:           fixed
> XTerm*VT100*foreground:     wheat XTerm*VT100*loginShell:     true
> XTerm*VT100*visualBell:     true
> 
> 
> When you change them, do an "xrdb -merge .Xdefaults" then run
> rxvt/xterm.  Some applications are case sensitive wrt resources,
> though I'm not sure that applies to rxvt & xterm.
> 

This is beginning to puzzle me more and more.  I can control the
colors of mutt (basically I want black fonts on a white background) as
root with /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color.  For some reason it
doesn't work when I put the color info in ~/.app-defaults/XTerm-color.
It then gets stranger:  Mutt ignores any color info I put in
.Xresources, although this does affect the color in xterm.  So
changing the color defaults for xterm as root in
/etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color changes them for both mutt and
xterm, but changing the color defaults in .Xresources only changes
them for xterm and not for mutt, and changing the color defaults in
~/.app-defaults/XTerm-color doesn't do anything.

Thanks for the suggestion,

Ric