Entered text is invisible in black terminals

[Micah Cowan]

Binary package hint: elvis

Upon installing elvis, and firing up elvisnox, I am surprised to discover that none of the text I enter, whether in insert mode or command mode, is at all visible on the terminal (which has a black background). The only visible text is a black-on-green mode indication string, and a blue-on-black indicator of the current line and column numbers. Text is visible in a black-on-white terminal (such as the default settings for rxvt).

This is using the default configuration, nothing whatsoever was changed after installation.

This is surprisingly poor behavior; elvis should not need to change the foreground color to anything other than "normal" mode (perhaps via "sgr0"). If it does do so, then it ought to specifically set the background color as well, and fill it entirely, so that we can have a guarantee of visible text.

This is particularly problematic since elvis installs itself to the alternatives system for "vi" with a very high priority, meaning that if the vi alternatives are set to "auto", the "vi" command is extremely likely to fire up elvis if it is installed.

[Andrew Fenn (andrewfenn)]

Could you elaborate on what you mean by visibility.

Are you saying that the text is not displaying or that the text is not visible because the text colour blends into the background colour?

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

It is not visible because the text color blends into the background color; setting gnome-terminal's color scheme to white-on-black resolves the issue.

If I comment the line «source! (elvispath("elvis.clr"))» in /etc/elvis/elvis.ini, the problem is resolved; therefore, it would seem to be a bug in the default configuration settings, rather than in elvis itself. The settings in /etc/elvis/elvis.clr seem to assume a non-black background when in terminal-mode. Changing the line within the "termcap" section from «color normal yellow or black» to «color normal yellow or black on white» also resolves the issue, in that it sets the background to a light color and fills it in (I don't know enough about elvis to know whether that could result in yellow-on-black in some instances).

[Jeff Anderson (jander99)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Andy Swartz (ss7andy)]

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 and just installed elvis. I ran into the same problem but found the solution of commenting out the clr line in the /etc/elvis/elvis.ini resolved the situation, however, this doesn't appear to be the best solution for newer users of Linux (such as myself :) ).