Exmh colorized replies

John Chambers jc at trillian.mit.edu
Fri May 17 17:00:06 EDT 2002


John Abreau writes:
| Before I upgraded to Redhat 7.3, exmh would colorize quoted text in
| messages;
| lines beginning with a single '>' were colored red, and line beginning with
| ">>" were colored a different shade of red.
|
| Since upgrading, exmh no longer does this. Any ideas why this would have
| broken, and more important, how I'd fix it?

Well, I'd consider this to be fixed. ;-)

One of the ongoing hassles that I find with new linux (or unix) boxes
is  typing  "ls  -l" and finding the output unreadable because of the
colored file names, many having little contrast  with  whatever  I've
chosen  as  the background.  So I waste time figuring out how to turn
off the coloring on this release.  Grrrr ...

Ultimately, the usual solution is to abandon whatever fancy  terminal
emulator  the vendor is pushing, and run "xterm -cm", which turns off
the colorization.  A bit of experimenting with -fg and -bg determines
what  gives  a good contrast on the machine's display, and everything
becomes readable.

This colorization is one of the things that long ago convinced me  to
read  mail in an xterm, and not use exmh.  I wasted far too much time
trying to get it to use readable colors, and I just gave up.




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