How to change the background color of curses applications

colorsncursesterminal

I hate that blue background which is everywhere in ncurses applications like: irssi, mc, tig, … I want to change that color, how can I do it?

I know that midnight commander has themes, but what about global settings for all CLI programs? I found that there's setterm in Linux and vidcontrol in FreeBSD, but vidcontrol doesn't work for me, and I think it's not that what I need because it's for VESA stuff. I'm working over ssh here.

Best Answer

Some terminals like xterm allow to redefine the colors via resource files or dynamically, and if it's exposed correctly in the terminfo entry for $TERM, you can do it with:

tput initc 4 1000 0 0

Change ANSI color 4 (normally blue) to RGB (1000, 0 0), that is bright red.

If the terminal doesn't support redefining colours (see infocmp -1 | grep initc), you can also, for applications that use terminfo, trick them into sending different escape sequences to request colour 4 (blue).

infocmp -x > terminal.info

Edit terminal.info, replace the name of the terminal with something like "myterm", and edit the "setab" property (set ANSI background).

Instead of 

setab=\E[4%p1%dm

That is:

tput setab 4

sends ^[[44m, change it to:

setab=\E[4%?%p1%{4}%=%t1%e%p1%d%;m

The %? ...., is an if-then-else, to say send "1" when asked for "4" and the requested one otherwise.

So

tput setab 4

will send ^[[41m, (red) and tput setab 5 will send ^[[45m

Then, compile it with:

TERMINFO=$HOME/.terminfo tic -x terminal.info

and use it as:

TERMINFO=$HOME/.terminfo TERM=myterm the-application-to-trick

That only works if the application uses the terminfo database to send sequences to the terminal.

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