Re: [PATCH] fbcon: Use background color for margins

On 07/30/2017 04:51 PM, Pavel Machek wrote:

Hi!

quoted

quoted

quoted

Screens that don't have a black border around the active area will have
ugly black bars for the margin when the text background color is not black.
This is especially noticeable on an LCD screen (not the backlit kind) when
the terminal colors are inverted.

Are you sure?

Of course I am sure. Otherwise I would not send a patch. ;-)

I have attached some pictures to explain it better. The default-console.jpg
picture shows what it looks like using just defaults. I think it is hard to
read the white text with the black background.

So, the solution is to invert the terminal colors. But when you do this, the
margins are not inverted, so you are left with black bars on the bottom and
the right as seen in inverted-without-patch.jpg.

With this patch applied, the margins are also inverted, so you don't have
the black bars as seen in inverted-with-patch.jpg. I think this is much
nicer.

  It is quite common to have different backgrounds in

quoted

different parts of the screen, how it is supposed to work there?

There will be nothing different in this regard. Only the margins (non-text
area) are changed.

So you have something like midnight commander, which uses colors.

Lets say top half of screen is normal, bottom one is inverted. What
color will borders be?

Will not they do something stupid (such as changing) when the
curses-based application refreshes?

Ah. I see what you mean now. The margin will be whatever is set for the 
vc_video_erase_char in the kernel, which can be changed by userspace. I 
tried midnight commander and sure enough, I still have the black margins 
when I invert the screen (`setterm -inverse on`). Interestingly, after 
allowing the console to blank after a timeout, the console was blanked 
with white, then after pressing a key to unblank, the margins were also 
white.

So, scratch this one. I will re-evaluate and send a new patch.