nicedark skin looks bad on black-on-white terminals

[egmont]

If your terminal has white background and black foreground, the "nicedark" skin doesn't look good. While most of mc's background is explicitly set to black, the dialogs (e.g. file copy, command history etc.) have an implicit white background (the terminal's default background color). This is because the skin file uses the unknown keyword "darkgray".

I guess the author's intent was "black". This way it'd look the same on black-on-white and white-on-black terminals (except of course the command line).

[ossi]

dark gray is "light black" per vga color palette.
maybe it should be grey, not gray? many systems accept both as synonymous (which they are), but maybe not mc.

[andrew_b]

Replying to ossi:

maybe it should be grey, not gray?

slang uses "gray" only. mc too.

[egmont]

If you change it to "gray" then the its look on white-on-black terminals (where the theme is likely being used currently) changes. The text over that gray background is quite hard to read. This clearly wasn't the author's intention, as he would have noticed it on his terminal.

I find it much more likely that he intended black background, and didn't notice the invalid keyword because he only tested on white-on-black. Changing to "black" is the fix that does not change (read: does not break :)) the look on white-on-black terminals, and makes the faulty case look just as great as the good case looks now.

[egmont]

Could you please apply the patch? It fixes the look of this skin on black-on-white terminals, and doesn't change the look on white-on-black ones.

Now that we have a user-friendly skin selector, it's likely that more people will explore skins, and it becomes more important that the ones we ship actually look nice and usable, rather than broken.

[andrew_b]

Replying to egmont:

Could you please apply the patch?

Applied: [9bbc51098ed53c6e4b83b8920e81463cc1521e29].
Thanks!