How to change the background color of curses applications?

Question

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.

Answer 1

if you switch your TERM variable to a terminal that does not support ANSI colors, you will not see any blue background anymore.

Answer 2

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 > 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 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.