Re: Reverse video rendered as blinking text, and attrcolor is gone

[Carl Drougge]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2022 at 12:05:49 -0500, János Barbero wrote:

> I recently updated from screen-4.0.2 which I had my own patches against to
> the latest development branch. I love most of the changes but one thing is
> incredibly annoying. Anything rendered as reverse video outside of screen
> renders as blinking text inside of screen. E.g. when I run cal, the current
> date blinks. When I search for something in less, the highlights blink.
> 
> In older versions of screen, I could have used attrcolor to remap this new
> behavior away, but that command was removed in 2015. Is there anything I
> can do with current versions? As it is, it's spectacularly annoying.

I don't know why attrcolor was removed, but I can offer termcapinfo as a
workaround. Assuming you use xterm, put

termcapinfo xterm* mb=\E[7m

in your screenrc and sanity will be restored. ("mb" is termcap-speak for
blink, and "\E[7m" is reverse video on most terminals.)

That said, I don't get this particular problem.

> I also noticed that screen now prompts for a password whenever I try to
> reattach and that this is a known issue with plans to make the behavior
> configurable again. No password I try to enter works, and "password" is no
> longer recognized as a command. I had to patch CheckPassword in socket.c to
> finally be able to reattach to screen. Is this on the roadmap for being
> made configurable?

This problem I have. It was one of two that made me decide the development
branch was not intended for use when I tried it a while ago. (The other
being my hardstatus line breaking and the docs not matching the new
behaviour in some way I forget.)

In my case passwords work on Debian but don't work on FreeBSD. (I don't
consider asking for them unconditionally acceptable even when they work
though.)