menucolors patch doesn't work with .nethackrc

[Ilja Sidoroff]

Ubuntu 9.10 ships nethack with menucolors patch, which works nicely if you don't have .nethackrc. If, however, you create your own .nethackrc with options, menucolors don't work anymore, even if menucolors option is not set/unset in the .nethackrc file.

This might be because of menucolors default to nothing when .nethackrc is present. Anyway, even then following .nethackrc doesn't produce coloured menu:

OPTIONS=noautopickup,showexp,menucolors,hpmon
MENUCOLOR="* blessed *"=green
MENUCOLOR="* holy *"=green
MENUCOLOR="* cursed *"=red
MENUCOLOR="* unholy *"=red
MENUCOLOR="* cursed * (being worn)"=orange&underline

[James Cowgill (jcowgill)]

Your nethackrc file is invalid. The menucolors patch accepts regexes so you need to use ".*" instead of just "*". In 3.6.0 nethack now warns you when you try to use an invalid regex, but it just silently failed in 3.4.3.

Try this in your nethackrc and it should work:

OPTIONS=noautopickup,showexp,menucolors,hpmon
MENUCOLOR=" blessed "=green
MENUCOLOR=" holy "=green
MENUCOLOR=" uncursed "=yellow
MENUCOLOR=" cursed "=red
MENUCOLOR=" unholy "=red
MENUCOLOR=" cursed .* (being worn)"=orange&underline

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for nethack (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]