I have turned inverse screen on with DEC private mode 5, to give myself the old-time Sun workstation black-on-white framebuffer console experience on the cheap.
Unfortunately, ncurses programs like vi emit a "visual bell" out of the box, instead of the BEL character, because this was the new friendlier way to do bells in shared offices in the 1980s. I remember it.
vb turns private mode 5 on and then off again, because there's no #DECVT control sequence for toggling the current state.
😀⌨️ We're thrilled whenever we receive a piece of Slovenian computer heritage that we don't yet have! This is the keyboard for the Iskra Delta PAKA 5000 terminal. Designed in the industrial style of the Triglav computer by Vid Brataševec, it is functionally a copy of the LK201 keyboard for the DEC VT220 terminal.
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The DEC VT-52 terminal, assembled in Slovenia by the company Kopa under the name Kopa 700.
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Try inverting the screen and switching between DEC VT520 "light" and "dark". (As you can see, my toolkit has a handy tool for doing this, but it's a simple exercise in printf(1) without.) If that's not satisfactory, then fiddle with the #terminal emulator's palette configuration.
There's nothing that you can do otherwise. In GUIs, applications have "Give me the user's choice of title bar colour" library calls. There's none of that for Unix TUIs.
@RL_Dane @teamtuck (continued...)
The _only_ control that you have is DECSCNM, an extension to ECMA-48 control sequences from DEC VTs that many terminal emulators (sort of, rxvt getting it wrong, for example) also support.
It basically inverts the sense of the SGR 7 (negative image/reverse video) attribute for the entire display. DEC VT520 doco called it "light" and "dark".
https://vt100.net/docs/vt510-rm/DECSCNM.html
@RL_Dane @teamtuck (continued...)
How the ECMA-48, #AIXTerm, and ITU T.416 indexed colours come out is up to the #terminal; as is, indeed, how the default colour comes out.
For these indexed colour schemes there's usually a palette that maps to RGB. Some terminal _emulators_ can adjust the palette. But real terminals didn't even have the 256-colour indexed system, let alone palettes.
The applications pretty much have no say.
The colour #terminal paradigm just doesn't work that way.
Applications can pick from the 8 colours of ECMA-48, or from that plus the additional 8 colours from IBM #AIXterm, or from the 256 indexed colour set of ITU T.416, or from the full ITU T.416 RGB direct colour system.
There are no "modes" or "themes". An application asks for the default colour, or for an explicit ECMA-48, AIXterm, T.416 indexed colour, or RGB direct colour.
@matt303 So it's almost certain that the software as written won't work with a real VT220. (-:
After all, people write "VT102" apps expecting to change colour, and they're magically alright because they work with XTerm et al.. The VT102 was monochrome.
@matt303 Does the client actually _have_ any VT220s?
I've been idly on the lookout for a VT525 for years.
It would be funny if your client were merely seeking compatibility with terminal _emulators_, which famously are woefully feature incomplete when compared with the actual DEC terminals they purport to emulate.
JdeBP
Computer History Museum 🇸🇮
JdeBP