Re: Mutt display problem in screen and tmux

[Monte Stevens]

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 11:43:36PM +0000, seanh wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 12:41:39PM -0500, Sadrul Habib Chowdhury wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 8:17 PM, seanh <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > > Anyone know what might be causing this problem?
> > >
> > > http://seanh.sdf.org/mutt_statusbar_problem.png
> > >
> > > The three horizontal bars in mutt (the help bar at the top, selected
> > > message bar in the middle, and status bar at the bottom) should be solid
> > > bars, there should not be gaps in the background colour where there is
> > > no text. The bug appears when I run mutt in screen or tmux, but not
> > > otherwise. It happens whatever terminal emulator I use. Right now I'm
> > > seeing it with mutt 1.5.20 and screen 4.00.03jw4.
> > >
> > >
> > Try playing with the 'defbce' command.
> 
> Thanks. I tried putting both `defbce on` and then `defbce off` in my
> screenrc and restarting screen, but the problem still occurs.

I notice the behavior you originally described on the mutt list.  I
first noticed it today, days after setting up xterm-256color so I could
see Ed's Xmas color theme.  Today, I played around with the '%*' printf
sequence to pad a string with spaces in my status bar and still keep
some additional characters at the right-most positions of that row.

What I am seeing is that the padding spaces are colored black (which
also happens to be the background color of my terminal) instead of the
color of my status bar, which is color17.

At Sadrul's suggestion, I tried 'defbce on', which caused the black
section to become a blue for which, as of yet, I cannot find a source.
It doesn't quite match up with the blue of my screen hardstatus line and
it isn't color17.

Then I disabled my Debian Lenny /etc/screenrc to see if the mystery-blue was
coming from there.  No, it wasn't.

Then I removed my color in my .muttrc file so that everything was white
text on black background, with the status bar being the opposite.  I
noticed that where the mystery-blue padding spaces had been was now
white and there were no gaps.

Then (this is starting to get into Abe Simpson territory) I looked at
all the blue entries in my mashed-up color-256 muttrc file to see if the
mystery blue was in there.

While checking likely suspects I noticed that when I switched from my
screen 1 mutt session to my screen 0 emacs session and back to mutt,
that the mystery blue turned into color17.  What the.

The line in my mutt color file was 'color status color47 color17'.  I
changed color17 to red: the padding spaces became black, until I
switched to another virtual terminal and then back again; they went from
black to red.  I also noticed that by scrolling through a list of
messages in mutt's pager view, the padding spaces could be made to be
red or black, depending on which direction I was scrolling.

I tried substituting tab characters for the spaces.  The color worked
but the right justification did not.

So, no solution here, just a bunch of rambling.  Myself, I like using
the dashes instead of spaces, or at least I do now.  I'm assuming that
this topic in not interesting to most list members, as such, you have my
apologies.

-- 
Monte

The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was
the style at the time.
 - Abraham J. Simpson