How to set background color of $PAGER?

Question

I usually set my terminal with transparent background. But, when I need to read a lot of text such as man, less, cat, etc., I want my background color to be solid black. I can change the backgrounds of vim and w3m. How to change the backgrounds of $PAGER, man, less, cat, more etc.? I'm on Debian-Buster using zsh shell with colored-man-page plugin installed.

Answer 1

That's actually multiple questions, where some have no useful answer:

• cat "could" be wrapped in an alias (capturing some of its uses), to set a particular background color, but whatever it sends to the terminal can change that background.
• $PAGER and more are redundant: you're unlikely to use anything but less underneath. The same applies to man (which uses $PAGER).
• For less... the basic problem is that it is designed to color the text on the screen, and is almost completely agnostic regarding the background color.

Referring to

• Documentation on LESS_TERMCAP_ variables?* and
• Less command change color of “~” and “(END)”?,

there's some mention of foreground (text) and background color. However, those do not mention that the terminal responds to this (used for resetting the bold attribute):

me      sgr0      turn off bold, blink and underline

by resetting colors as well. (It uses the same solution for resetting blink, but you are less likely to find that to be a problem). It does use a different string for resetting underline, so that part of me's description does not apply.

To make less use a particular color scheme, you would have to construct environment variables as suggested in this answer, fooling less into setting the background color when it is turning off bold or blink.