lynx-dev Lynx, colors and VT100

[Ismael Cordeiro]

I've seen many messages here saying that VT100 doesn'support color. That's
true for real VT100 terminals, not for VT100/VT102 emulators, and I don't
believe that many people are using real VT100 terminals nowadays. Most VT100
emulators I know support color. Last year I discussed that subject with
Thomas and others in comp.infosystems.www.browsers.misc.

The best way to get colors in Lynx when using a VT100 emulator is by
compiling Lynx with Slang. Slang doesn't assume that VT100 doesn't support
colors and displays colors when you use the "-color" option in the command
line or set "Show color" to "ON" or "ALWAYS" in the options menu. I've been
using Lynx with colors since version 2.7.2, when I decided to compile Slang
myself and compile Lynx with it, and I've read some people saying that they
were getting colors with Lynx 2.6 compiled with Slang.

I told many people that I was using Lynx with colors and received many
emails from people who were in ISPs using Lynx compiled with ncurses asking
me how to get colors. I began to search for termcap/terminfo capabilities
related to colors and tried many of them with Lynx compiled with ncurses and
Solaris' curses. Now I can say that I found the capabilities that can be put
in the termcap/terminfo VT100 definition to allow Lynx to display colors.
Here they are:

termcap
-------
:Co#8:pa#64:op=\E[37;40m:AF=\E[3%dm:AB=\E[4%dm:

terminfo
--------
colors#8, pairs#64, op=\E[37;40m, setaf=\E[3%p1%dm, setab=\E[4%p1%dm,

I use those in Solaris (terminfo) and FreeBSD (termcap) and I've received
reports of they being successfully used in other systems.

Ismael
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       | ISMAEL CORDEIRO            | mailto:address@hidden      |
       | Production sound mixer     | http://www.ismael.cordeiro.com/ |
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