[plug] Virtual Console colours

[Peter Wright]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 08:14:56AM +0800, Clinton Butler wrote:
> Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> > > I have played and played with these... I found that if I do  a
> > > 'echo -e '\033[43;43;22m'
> > > the result is a lime background with white text... but I can't go black
> > > background with lime text :o/
> >
> > echo -e "\033[32m"
> 
> this works.. thanks... but is there any permanent way?

Well... there's the quasi-permanent way of putting the above line in your
~/.bashrc file (assuming you use bash and I've guessed the correct file to
put it in (I don't use bash myself)). This should mean that everytime
you log in, that command will be executed.

However, this still won't really work the way you want - see below.

> also.. top kills the colours too :o( is there any way to stop this..
> other than stopping the refresh?

Yeah... now you've reached the limitations of my suggested solution ;-).

I'm _guessing_ (don't quote me on this) that the problem is that the echo
command above doesn't actually change the "default" terminal settings, it
just temporarily changes the foreground/background/style - and this will
only last until some other program is run (such as top, or mutt, or vim, or
lynx, or slrn) that does any kind of screen "graphics" using the curses or
slang libraries (hell, even if you use a coloured shell prompt). After that
I guess the console would return to "default" colouring, which is the nice
lightgrey-on-black that you started out with. :)

Damn... I know there's a way to do this properly... I actually used a
program to do this a couple of years ago (as I generally find black text on
a white background _much_ easier to read), but then I found that I spent
very little time on the console (as opposed to using X, where you can more
easily control terminal colouring), and I couldn't really be bothered using
it anymore.

I'll have a go at tracking down the program I used, Clinton, but I don't
anticipate any quick success. Try searching for a better solution yourself if
you have time (use the wonderful google.com or groups.google.com :).

And if anyone else has a "real" solution (Jeremy? :), please feel free to
jump in and enlighten us.

>      _.._    _    Clinton Butler

Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/

-- 
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