Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; 	charset="iso-8859-1"
Subject: Color Schemes
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:17:38 -0500
Message-ID: <83FFB2C3A0EAAB418A35DFA0FBCD60EC02312FAA@nsc-exch.nationalsystems.com>
From: "Richard Lynch \(Contractor\)" <RLynch AT quikorder DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Noobie cygwin alert!

Hopefully this isn't too verbose...

This may be a generalized Un*x question, but I've been going in circles for
awhile now, and cygwin is the current beast being beaten on.

I like color-coding of ls and vim and man and all that.

But I can't handle the default color scheme.  My eyes are too old.

So I changed the colors in cygwin DOS-like shell preferences to black
foreground and white background.

This was great, except that all the built-in Un*x tools such as ls, less,
man, etc are still assuming the original color scheme.

Since some words then appear in white in those tools, I get man pages that
look like the CIA attacked them. :-)

I.e., big chunks of text are "invisible" as they are in reverse video of
black on white which makes white on black which REALLY makes white on white.
:-(

I managed to figure out how to alter LS_COLORS via ~/.dircolorsrc but that
only applies to ls, and does nothing for less et al.

I still haven't actually changed u+s and g+s to be something other than
white, as the number of color choices is so limited, but at least I know how
to do it, once I pick a color...  Is that an exhaustive list of colors?
30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white
What about 38 and 39?
I could just try it, but knowing my luck, it would just lock up the whole
terminal forever.

Before that, though, I was hoping for a more general solution that would
handle ls, less, man, vim, etc...

I've looked in /etc/termcap and that's just way too geek-code for me to
handle...

Is there some kind of GTK or ncurses GUI interface to cygwin/Un*x color
schemes for various tools that could be used to toy with color schemes
instead of editing multiple /etc/ and ~/.*rc files?
[I'm not running X.]
I usually LIKE editing config files, mind you, but not when there are
multiple files for multiple color schemes with multiple formats, and, to me,
I just want to pick a nice color scheme and be done with it.

Is there some low-level way to change the color schemes upon which ls, less,
and friends based their color schemes?

I attempted to alias less='less -r' (and -R) in .bashrc, but it did not seem
to help 'less', even after logout and starting a new shell -- plus, as noted,
I'm hoping there is some ENV variable somewhere I can use to affect the color
scheme system-wide, rather than one application at a time.

Perhaps there is something from the cygwin setup.exe I could add in?

I'm not adverse to downloading and compiling source or anything -- I do that
all the time.

I've been using Un*x for a long time, and it seems like any time I try to
attack this problem, I end up with really borked output -- control characters
and badly-wrapped lines in less, no color-coding at all for ls, and vim,
well, I've learned to just live with color or no color, and not try to muck
with that, since it usually involves changing files I don't have access to on
somebody else's box. :-(

I suspect (and hope) that I've just missed some mind-numbingly simple tool to
change the color scheme system-wide...

TIA!

-- 
http://nationalsystems.com


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/