On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 1:39 AM, zxq9 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 02/05/2013 01:05 PM, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
>>>
>>> On Feb 4, 2013 3:18 PM, Stephen Isard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Is anybody else out there trying to use lynx in SL6.3? When I bring it
>>> up, the text for url links comes up as yellow on a white background, and
>>> is pretty much invisible. This wasn't the case in SL5.5. I know how to
>>> fix the problem for my own use, but lynx shouldn't come up unusable by
>>> default. Before I try reporting it as a bug to the packagers, I want to
>>> be sure it happens to other people too, and isn't due to some
>>> idiosyncracy of my own setup. Anyone?
>>
>>
>> Change your terminal settings.
>> The background color is the default background color of your terminal.
>>
>> It sucks if you are on a default white background xterm but works well
>> if you are on a black background terminal.
>> that you are experiencing is a software color philosophy difference. I
>> personally hate white backgrounds because they hurt my eyes over time
>> but the default color coded scheme for the terminal is impossible to
>> read with a black background. In addition every admin I've ever worked
>> with and the hundreds of people I've talked with in user groups who
>> don't run X11 on their servers hate it too. Do what every one else does
>> change it to your liking and deploy the changes to all if your hosts.
>
>
> The default Lynx color scheme is designed for a dark background. Since at
> least the mid 90's people have been complaining about that on the Lynx dev
> list. Those users are invariably users of an X-based window manager that has
> a windowed terminal program that defaults to a light background.
>
> This idea has always been rejected. Making Lynx friendly to terminal
> emulators at the expense of breaking Lynx in its primary use case (runlevels
> 1-3) is unacceptable. In particular, system administrators trying to get X
> (or anything else) back up need Lynx to work correctly on a dark background,
> because that's all they've got to work with in many cases.
>
> Setting the X terminal emulators to actually emulate the way real terminals
> work, on the other hand, sounds like a good idea (to me). I don't know
> anyone who leaves terminal programs with the default light background
> scheme, but maybe some do. Anyway, that can be considered a distro-level
> issue since a distro could decide to set their own defaults for Gnome
> Terminal and Kterm instead of just going along with the embedded X aversion
> to dark backgrounds. (In the early 80's "dark" meant "old fashioned", so it
> wasn't politically acceptable within that particular dev tribe. Today I
> don't think anyone cares.)

You *could* put a wrapper on it, that resets the default colors if the
"$DISPLAY" vairable is set. Unfortunately, other terminal emulators
such as "Putty" also have some odd settings that are somewhat
unfriendly with Lynx, and tastes vary so much, it's hard to predict
what you would like, and depending on whether you use "xterm" or the
gnome-terminal-window for X windows, there's a tremendous variety of
color settings to manipulate.