Re: default color profile of mutt

R Wood wrote, on 03/27/2008 03:04 PM:
On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 at 18:15 GMT, Michael Goerz <newsgroup898sfie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

I find the default color profile of mutt on my Suse 10.3 machine very
pleasing. But, where are these default defined? I'd love to put them in
my .muttrc so I can have them on other systems as well.

Any suggestions?

Michael

Suggestion #1 is to post the question in the right newsgroup, which in this
case would be comp.mail.mutt. But don't do that yet because you will surely
be told to go read the manual for such a basic question.
I did. It was a crossposting (since I thought this might be something specific to SuSE -- the SuSE default color scheme of mutt.)


If you don't have your own .muttrc mutt will use the system version, found at
/etc/Muttrc (note the capital M). So,
/etc/Muttrc doesn't contain a lot (i.e. no colors). It's a long file, but almost everything is commented out.

Suggestion #2 is to copy /etc/Muttrc to your home directory (~/.muttrc) and
edit the bejeezus out of it. Lastly, sounds like you could use a good
beginner's guide to mutt. Here, have mine:
http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/98/ (HTML and PDF versions).
Okay, I wasn't specific enough on my problem. I do have my own mutt file, and there are colors defined in it (copied from some example on the web.) And, these colors are part of the total appearance on my system, which I'm trying to reproduce (if I take out the 'source ~/.mutt/colors' from my .muttrc, it's all black and white, so that's SuSE's default). Now what was confusing me was this: I copied my entire mutt profile a a machine on my school's cluster. When I ssh'd in, and started mutt, it looked different than it looked on my machine. Most notably, the background in the index is black. The main problem, though, is that there are really ugly contrasts: the ascii-art-"arrows" that indicate threads still have a white background. Likewise, the header when viewing a message.
My thinking was that the reason for these differences was that my own ..muttrc did not specify the color for all configurable elements (which it probably doesn't), and that the remaining elements got their color from some global config file. Hence I was asking what the global config file might be.

But, the guide you were pointing me to mentions:

"You may want different color schemes for different circumstances though: xterms are black on white unless you specify otherwise, but virtual consoles are white on black. In addition, aterm, gnome-terminal, and konsole are all terminal emulators capable of using transparency and background images, both of which are very pleasant effects."

So, the probable explanation for the difference seems to be different terminal types (local xterm vs. ssh terminal). The different defaults are not system defaults, but terminal settings. Am I getting this right? I guess I'll have to read though the docs again and play around with my configuration, to get something that looks nice on all systems.

Any other comments on this issue?


12,000 downloads can't be wrong. It covers set up, usage, and more advanced
configuration. Happy mutting.
Yeah, it's a very nice guide... I was looking at it before, and I'll go through the color section again.

Thanks,
Michael
.

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