For those who don't know, ncurses normally uses "space" characters to erase the terminal (i.e. set it to blank), which can make copying from mutt a bit annoying, since each line appears to be padded with spaces all the way to the end of the terminal. If your termcap identifies that your terminal supports "back color erase" (bce), that can be used to clear lines instead of writing spaces, thereby making it more convenient to copy text from email displayed in mutt.
BUT, for some reason, this can break horizontal things that are supposed to have a colored background (like the index indicator bar or the compose menu attachment separator bar).
I found a workaround for index_format (namely, to use %> and pad things out with non-breaking spaces), but that solution doesn't work for everything. For example, the bar across the middle of the compose menu, that's supposed to look like this:
-- Attachments________________________________________________
^-- this is supposed to be blank space, colored
like the status line
Looking at mutt's code, that line is drawn with this:
SETCOLOR (MT_COLOR_STATUS);
mvaddstr (HDR_ATTACH - 1, 0, _("-- Attachments"));
BKGDSET (MT_COLOR_STATUS);
clrtoeol ();
BKGDSET (MT_COLOR_NORMAL);
SETCOLOR (MT_COLOR_NOTMAL);
Now, I don't completely understand this, but I guess my question is...
is this a mutt bug, or is my terminal's bce implementation broken
(i.e. it's supposed to clear with the background color, and isn't)?
I read the man page on clrtoeol(), and on my system, it says that it fills in the background with the color set by wbkgdset() (rather than simply the color set by bkgdset(), as mutt uses). Are bkgdset and wbkgdset supposed to be interchangeable?
Does anyone know what might be going on here?(If it helps, I'm using Apple's Terminal.app... it may not have the greatest BCE support, but surely there's a way to clear things without going the route of *spaces*)
~Kyle --Most men make little use of their speech than to give evidence against their own understanding.
-- Lord Halifax
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