Re: Making the "Panel" Background White?

[Randy Kramer <rhkramer fast net>]

Pavel,  

Thanks very much for your response!  I've interspersed notes below --
one, on antialiasing, gets pretty far off topic, but I would be
interested if anybody can comment on what I think I see (I've noticed it
more in programs other than MC, probably because I run other programs
far more often than MC).

Pavel Roskin wrote:
> Randy Kramer wrote:
>
> > How do I make the background of the panels white?
>
> I think you cannot do it.  You can make it lightgray.  Some systems don't
> support bright colors for backgrounds, therefore bright colors are
> replaced with their non-bright counterparts.
>
> It is possible to use bright backgrounds on many terminals, but I don't
> think you can do it with MC without changing its code.  If you make a
> patch I'll consider it.

Ok, thanks -- if I make a patch I'll be impressed!!  I would like to
dabble in C (and C++) open source development, but I have a long way to
go before I get there.  (Although, without looking at the code, this
doesn't sound like it should be *too* hard.  ;-),  but, don't wait for
me -- if I get serious about trying it I'll post to the list again.) 
Oops, I almost forgot -- when I run mc from SourceForge (via ssh), the
background is white -- somebody suggested to me that they may have
modified mc to do this -- too bad they don't make it available.  (I
assume the license for MC is some open source license.)

> > I try to set the colors, using, for example,
> > xterm=normal=black,white:... in my ~/.mc/ini file, and it definitely
> > affects the colors, but the best I can do is get a gray panel (black
> > text on gray).  There are some other color oddities too -- when I
> > specify yellow as the background for "directory" it shows up as red (as
> > does red).
>
> Either your terminal is misconfigured (brown and red too similar) or you
> have problems with color vision.  Run this:

I'm not aware of a problem with my color vision, but I am getting older
;-).
> mc -C directory=red,yellow
>
> Do you see the text or you have red on red?  What terminal aree you using?

Well, I can see that there is text there, but it appears to be almost
the same color (red more than yellow) and very hard to read.  It appears
the same for my son, but I'll check with my wife when she comes home.

Just for information, I'm running konsole 1.0.2 from KDE 2.2.1 on a PC
running Mandrake 8.1.  I get the same results on konsole 1.0.1 from KDE
2.1 running Mandrake 7.2, however both use the same monitor (manual KVM
switch), but different color cards.

BTW, mc -C directory=yellow,red gives significantly better results.  I'm
not sure why, but i have a suspicion (that may not apply in this case)
-- I see similar problems in comparing black text on a white background
to white text on a black background in things like web browsers, and
think it occurs more often with anti-aliased text.  

I suspect that (some?) anti-aliasing algorithms always assume black text
on white (for example), and pick all the intermediate pixel colors from
a scale arranged black to white (instead of white to black).  I don't
think I said that very well -- I'm trying to say that when you antialias
black text on white, maybe you determine that a particular pixel should
be 75% black, but when you antialias white text on black, that pixel
should be 75% white.  I think some of the antialiasing programs make
that pixel 75% black instead of 75% white, making the white text on
black background less readable.  

I have only a vague understanding of antialiasing and how it is done,
but I believe there is a problem something like this, or there is a
built in bias in the human eye (mine only?), that make this appear to
occur.  I know that you are not the right sudience to resolve the
problem if it really does exist, but this post gave me a chance to
describe the problem, and I don't really know where to post a bug. 
(Maybe KDE, and GNOME, and ... -- IIRC, I also see the same problem on
Microsoft stuff, like IE5.)

PS: No need to respond to this -- I appreciate your reply, I just
thought I'd offer some more feedback to the list.

regards,
Randy Kramer