Re: Console colour behaviour change in Linux
- Posted by DerekParnell (admin) Oct 23, 2010
- 1405 views
This is probably going to be one of the worst bug reports ever.
Maybe ... I've read it three times now and I'm still not certain what the issues are.
It only happens on certain consoles, specifically Puppy Linux consoles, Ubuntu consoles, and putty consoles are unaffected.
Ok, Puppy not working, but Ubuntu is ok and putty is ok. Have I got that right?
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.
Yes, I think I did that change ... it was a long time ago.
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.
Are you saying that whatever color the background is, if it is a highlight color then any text, regardless of the text color, on it is not displayed?
Or are you saying that if the background color is a highlight color and the text color is the same highlight color then the text can't be seen. And the old behaviour was that if a highlight color was used on the background that instead of showing it correctly, it showed the equivalent un-highlighted color.
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.
It goes back a long way; maybe six months ago or more.
Having these bold colours is useful, but would it be possible to have a switch to turn off the 'new' behaviour programmatically?
So, you'd like a way to go back to the previous incorrect behaviour.
Why don't you just fix your application to ensure that the background and text colour are never the same.
