Re: xterm's bold and underline colours

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 11:36:04PM -0800, The Rev. Shamim, D.D., LFHCfS wrote:
> I don't know whose idea it was to enable all that ANSI colour crap by
> default. (Is it only RedHat that does it, or do other distributions do
> it too?) What's worse, the colors seem set up for the "cool" look of
> black backgrounds, with lots of white and pale yellow. Try using a
> light background in your xterms: all man pages become unreadable!

I have the same problem in reverse: my Red Hat-supplied xterms default
to black, blue and green on white. Since I don't like large expanses of
white on my screen (they make my eyes hurt), I set the background to
black -- so now my man pages have blue headings on black...

I've discovered that xterm itself is responsible for this: man is
outputting control sequences for bold and underline, and xterm maps
those into colours. You can test this easily in the shell:

  tput bold; echo bold text; tput sgr0
  tput smul; echo underlined text; tput sgr0

To prevent this, run xterm with -bdc -ulc +nul, or set the equivalent
X resources. You may also like -cm (colorMode), which tells xterm to
ignore colour-change control sequences (and its own mappings, it seems).
(Other settings are also possible -- see the man page.)


hope this helps,
-- 
Daniel Biddle