Can the ANSI colour assignments be modified?
There's no way to do that at the moment. Is there a reason you want to change the colors?
Brian
I don't like the defaults! I like to run Pine with colour enabled but a white background. I also prefer the other colours to be brighter than ATs defaults.
I aim to mimic its appearance when I run it using dtterm on Solaris.
Can you send me your .pinerc so I can bring up pine with the same color settings you are using?
Also, a snapshot of dtterm and Absolute showing the same pine screen would help me see your differences.
Is AbsoluteTelnet completely out of whack when compared to dtterm or is it that Absolute just needs some color tweaks to make it look similar?
(bpence at celestialsoftware.net)
Looking at the color settings that are available in pine... There is an option for 'force ansi-16-color' that provides some brighter versions of the standard eight colors. Unfortunately, this option is not working correctly with AbsoluteTelnet at the moment. I know why and I'll fix it tonight.
I was able to test this in xterm with satisfying results.
I was not able to test it with dtterm because my solaris box with dtterm does not have pine and my linux box with pine does not have dtterm.
Question....
When in dtterm and you go to select a color, do you get 8 foreground and 8 background colors to choose from or 16 foreground and 16 background?
Brian
Dtterm is also restricted to 8 colours, however they are brighter than the Absolute Terminal defaults. Here are screenshots of the colour selection dialog as viewed in dtterm and Absolute Terminal:
<broken links removed>
It might be okay if you can make your program work with the 16 colour option. Thanks for your help.
Stephen,
Yes, it looks like the 16-color support will work. In most terminals, there are 8 basic colors (red, green, blue, black, white, cyan, purple, yellow) and 8 bright versions of the same colors. In pine's default 8-color mode, it defaults to the non-bright versions. In 16-color mode, it allows you to select the dim or bright versions of the colors directly, giving you 16 to choose from. An older method (the one originally supported by AbsoluteTelnet) for a host to specify using bright colors was to include the BOLD attribute for the text. When text is colored red and also BOLDED, the bright-red color should be displayed. This give you 16 foreground colors to choose from, but still only allows for 8 background colors. A newer method allows directly assigning 16 different foreground and 16 different background colors. This method is what pine supports, but was not supported in AbsoluteTelnet until 3.58:
For some reason, your dtterm is showing the bright versions of the colors, even when pine is telling it to display dim. Perhaps you've modified this behavior through a config file or something. To enable 16-color mode, you can use the 'force' option in pine, but I'm not sure how that will make dtterm behave if you then open pine in x-windows/dtterm. Alternatively, set your TERM environment variable to xterm-16olor (In absolute, go to Options->Properties->VT Options under Terminal Options, uncheck 'automatic' and type xterm-16color in the 'terminal string' field. Logout/login and your TERM variable should show xterm-16color). If xterm-16color does not work as a TERM variable, your system may not support it.
There are additional color modes that can be supported. There is an 88-color mode and a 256-color mode. However, I'm not aware of any application that uses these. If I could find one, I could do some testing and develop these modes as well. Anyway... Enjoy!
Brian
With the Pine 16 colour forcing option set the colour selection dialog still only shows 8 dull, colours. The other selections are simply grey.
The same version of Pine using the XFree86 xterm allows correct selection of all 16 colours - and the colour values used can be configured using X resources.
Dtterm only shows the bright colours you can see in my screenshot above. There is no way to configure the colour values for dtterm.
And you're sure you're running 3.58?
Brian
Arrghh! Sorry! I thought I had installed the new version but must have got confused somehow.
Version 3.58 works exactly as I need it to. Excellent support - thanks very much.
No problem!
I think this will be a nice addition to the functionality of AbsoluteTelnet.
I'm also looking into adding the 88 and 256 color modes found in xterm. I've found some scripts to test the functionality but the only application that I've found that actually uses it is emacs.
I'm not sure how big demand for the feature will be, but it won't be that hard and it'll make some nice screen snapshots!!
Brian
