Mageia forum

When I run "man" (in an xterm) part of the text is shown in royal blue, and part in magenta. A similar thing happens in the Perl debugger. With my old system (Mandriva 2005) I was able to change these colours by setting two values via xrdb. I think they were *colorBD and *colorUL, but can't be sure as my old machine is dead. I've Googled and found suggestions to set similar variables (XTerm*colorBD and XTerm*colorUL or XTerm*VT100*colorUL and XTerm*VT100*colorBD) but none of these have any effect.
As I work with a dark blue background the default colours make the output from "man" almost impossible to read.

I am ideally looking for a solution which will let me define the two colours as hex values, but failing that a way to restore to bold and underlined text.

Any solution using just the 8 basic colours (as in LS_COLORS) is not much use for me, as they don't work well with my colour settings

Does it happen in other terminals?

No, in lxterminal I get bold and underlining rather than colours, but the "normal" text is washed out and hard to read, so that's not really a solutilon/

I think that's more of a pager setting, not directly the terminal. Check the less color options & settings.
E.g.

Code: Select all

set | grep -i less

That gives:
LESSCHARSET=utf-8
LESSOPEN='|/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh %s'
SYSTEMD_PAGER='/usr/bin/less -FR'

Which doesn't seem to have anything to do with colours

I have now managed to get it using the colours I want, but not in the first xterm that I open, only in subsequent ones. I have put the settings I want into a file colours_for_xrdb, and my .bashrc has the line xrdb -merge ~/colours_for_xrdb. So it seems that my .bashrc is not sourced until after I have created the xterm, which is very strange, but at least I can read the man pages now.

I've finally worked out what was happening. I opened the first xterm from the Application Launcher Menu, and the second xterm by typing "xterm &" in the first xterm. They looked the same except that the first had "Terminal" in the title bar, and the second had "xterm". It seems that the command in the menu which is labelled xterm actually runs "xterm -name Terminal", so it was ignoring the Xresources I had set for xterm.
I've now added settings for Terminal to my colours_for_xrdb file, and everything is displayed correctly.

But why does the Application Launcher Menu not just run "xterm"?

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [SOLVED], thanks

I would mark it SOLVED if I knew how to , but unlike other forums I use, I can't see an Edit button. Is it indicated by some sort of background image? I always override the background and foreground of web pages as I can only read light text on a plain dark background

The Edit-button is in the top-right corner of your message-frame.

The Edit button is totally invisible with my accessibility settings, but I eventually found it by hovering my mouse and looking for a cursor change

Next time we know - just tell us that you got bad vision and we can take care of that for you