Console colour behaviour change in Linux
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Oct 23, 2010
- 1398 views
Hi
This is probably going to be one of the worst bug reports ever.
It only happens on certain consoles, specifically Puppy Linux consoles, Ubuntu consoles, and putty consoles are unaffected.
At some point in the recent past either the binaries have been updated, or the includes have been updated to affect the behaviour of displaying characters to consoles.
These particular consoles can no longer display characters where the background is highlighted. Highlighted / bold characters are displayed as they should, but only if the background is not highlighted. Previous to this if I asked for a highlighted background colour, then I got the non highlighted colour, for instance YELLOW would be displayed as BROWN for the background, though YELLOW characters would display as YELLOW.
I cannot tell you which build where the change happened, as I have updated several times (currently using 3416), and the problem went unnoticed until I released a program update. I remember at some point in the past (a couple of years or so ago) a similar problem was created by changing the method characters were displayed, and the solution was to revert to the previous method of displaying characters.
Having these bold colours is useful, but would it be possible to have a switch to turn off the 'new' behaviour programmatically?
Chris
