> My terminal colour configuration is black on white. > After using mutt, the terminal colours are changed to grey on > black. Workaround: type "reset" afterwards. > Btw. neither xterm nor gnome-terminal mess with the colours, so > I suspect, that the error is in xfce4-terminal, not mutt. > This behaviour was not present in wheezy.
This applies to all vte-based terminals (lxterminal, etc). As for the behaviour change, it is in mutt or one of libraries it uses, not in xfce4-terminal or vte. Let's, from an unstable system (including the terminal) log in to a jessie server, and compare. With stable mutt, you get default fg on default bg, with unstable mutt, grey on black. So let's diff the output: \e[43d # go to column 1 line 43 (1-based) Mailbox is unchanged.\n # write a string \e[39;49m # fg=default, bg=default +\e[37m # fg=grey +\e[40m # bg=black \r # go to column 1 \e[K # clear line to the right \e[43;1H # go to column 1 line 43 (redundant...) \e[?1049l # restore cursor position, switch to primary screen \r # go to column 1 \e[?1l # switch grey arrow keys to "normal" mode \e> # switch keypad arrow keys to "normal" mode Mailbox is unchanged.\n # write a string As you can see, new mutt explicitely sets the colors to grey/black immediately after setting them to default/default. This is the cause of the bug you see. And why xterm and gnome-terminal don't exhibit it? It's because of \e[?1049l which is an xterm extension. Many terminals don't implement it in the first place -- this results in mutt not restoring the screen, which is okay, and even if they do, the documentation is really unclear. Thomas Dickey's ctlseqs.txt refers to DECRC, which says just "Restore Cursor". If you look elsewhere for guidance, you'll usually find "restore cursor position". I'd say the correct thing is to follow granddaddy vt100 which restored colors/boldness/etc as well, but it'd undebatable that confusion exists. But let's assume that xterm's interpretation is correct, and we immediately change all terminals in Debian unstable to restore colors on DECRC. The problem is, a good part, perhaps even majority, of mutt users don't execute it locally but ssh to a mail server elsewhere. Thus, very often the terminal will run Debian stable or oldstable, some derivative (like, say, maemo which is EOL thus won't ever change this), some other distribution or even a completely non-Linux OS whose terminals we don't have any control on. Thus, let's ponder the purpose of mutt's change: it forces grey-on-black just to immediately restore it. That's utterly pointless, regardless of whether the restore is expected to work or not. My conclusion: whoever we blame, this bug is 100% a mutt regression, and needs to be fixed there (or in a library mutt uses). Meow! -- An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy. _______________________________________________ Pkg-xfce-devel mailing list Pkg-xfce-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-xfce-devel