Re: VGA console client weirdness

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 11:27:25AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> * Colors.  When reading an email with mutt, quotes (lines starting with a '>')
>   appear in bright green.  The problem is that if I go down inside the mail
>   while viewing it with mutt's builtin pager (pressing <space>) and then go 
> back
>   to the page where the quote appears (pressing '-'), it gets displayed in
>   dark green.  Similar things can happen with lynx.

You are running the VGA console in the 512 glyphs / 8 colors mode.  If you
use more than 8 colors in that mode, even temporarily, the client chooses
replacement colors for the 9th+ color.  As you remove and add content (by
scrolling, for example), the color allocation might change, as it is
dynamic.

I found that many programs work well with only 8 colors.  mutt, lynx, bitchx
etc can be configured to use more colors than that, and you will see issues. 
On the bright side, this mode allows you to have up to 512 different glyphs
on the screen at the same time!  This means you can use UTF-8 mutt and read
all your korean spam, lots of fun!

The other mode is 256 glyphs and all 16 colors.  In this case, you will not
be able to get as much out of unicode support as in the other mode, but
color allocation will never fail and always be correct.  Currently, there is
no way to choose the mode but by changing 512 to 256 in
console-client/vga.c:vga_dusplay_init (when setting disp->df_size).  A
command line option for this will be added later.
 
> * Scrolling in mutt (browsing emails with arrows) works fine if the 
> highlighted
>   emails are displayed in the first ten lines or so of the screen.  However,
>   if you do down (e.g. the second half of the screen) and then try to go back
>   using the up arrow, then the screen doesn't get refreshed and the 
> highlighted
>   item remains on the same line.  IOW, it behaves like if the terminal was
>   about 5 lines high.

I think this was fixed by the following change to the console's term
definition:

2002-10-10  Marcus Brinkmann  <marcus@gnu.org>

        * hurd.ti (cub1): Change from \E[D to ^H.

You might want to try it out by loading the CVS version with "tic -x hurd.ti"
If it is not fixed (verify you really got the change with "infocmp", ti
files can be overridden per user!), then I will need more details.
 
Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/