white-on-black or black-on-white?
OK, this is a weird one, and not terribly important although it did
make me go "huh?" for a couple of days. I'm curious as to whether
this is a bug and what causes it. It surely can't be intentional?
I'm using mutt-1.5.14-4 as seen on Fedora 7, compiled with ncurses 5.6,
in an xterm (X.Org 6.8.99.903(227)) with default colours (i.e. in normal
operation the xterm displays black text on a white background).
"mutt -n -F /dev/null" comes up in white on a black background. Display
an email that doesn't completely fill the screen, and it's still white
on black.
Type ":color normal green black" and now it's green on black. All
fine so far.
Now type ":color error red default" and the unoccupied part of the
screen below the email suddenly turns white (along with the right-
hand-sides of all header lines) even though it has nothing to do with
the "error" colour setting. Typing ":color error white black" (to put
it back the way it was) does not fix this either.
It turns out that the colour of the unoccupied area below the email is
controlled by "color tilde" even though tilde is set to off (and that's
the one colour I'd failed to set in my .muttrc). I'm not sure this is
intuitive: I shouldn't be able to set the colour of something that isn't
there, and it would be better if these lines were the same colour as the
email when tilde is turned off.
It also turns out that specifying "default" for any one colour switches
the whole of mutt from the default white-on-black into black-on-white,
except where colour settings have been specified. I find that a bit
weird.
imc