find_orb messes up terminal colour map

[Mikea1985]

Running find_orb in a linux terminal seems to mess up the terminal's colour map, in a way that persists after find_orb is no longer in use, persisting until the terminal is closed (fortunately it does not persist when a new terminal is opened). This is somewhat annoying when working on a small laptop monitor, as I don't really have screen real-estate enough to have multiple terminals up, so it's easiest to use one terminal for everything, but once the terminal has been used for find_orb, it's very straining on the eyes to try to use the terminal for other tasks (like browsing files, editing observations/scripts/commands, etc).
Here are a before and after screenshot from a test directory showing the change of colours:
Before:

After:

Is there some way to fix this so that the original colours return when find_orb is exited? Perhaps rather than changing the colour scheme of the terminal, find_orb just uses specific colours? Alternatively, when it changes the colour scheme, it could save the old settings in a backup somewhere and set them back when find_orb is exited.

[Bill-Gray]

Well, that's a new one on me. I do sometimes see odd things if Find_Orb crashes. Normally, the ncurses library will reset the terminal on exit to its initial configuration, but if it crashes, you don't get that. I don't think that's what's going on here, though, because I don't see remnants from Find_Orb's display. It looks as if it exited normally, but left you with weird colors. Is that accurate?

In what terminal are you running? I'm usually using xfce4-terminal, sometimes rxvt. I see an Ubuntu logo on the screen shots, but I'm not really familiar with Ubuntu. ncurses is famously good at handling a variety of terminals, but yours may be an exception.

If you run reset in the terminal, do you recover your original colors?

[Bill-Gray]

Also, it occurs to me that I should ask : do the screen colors you see when Find_Orb is running resemble those shown here?

[Mikea1985]

Sorry, I got sidetracked and forgot to continue responding to this issue.

Well, that's a new one on me. I do sometimes see odd things if Find_Orb crashes. Normally, the ncurses library will reset the terminal on exit to its initial configuration, but if it crashes, you don't get that. I don't think that's what's going on here, though, because I don't see remnants from Find_Orb's display. It looks as if it exited normally, but left you with weird colors. Is that accurate?

That appears to be accurate. I see no remnant of the find_orb interface, just remnants of the colour-scheme.

In what terminal are you running? I'm usually using xfce4-terminal, sometimes rxvt. I see an Ubuntu logo on the screen shots, but I'm not really familiar with Ubuntu. ncurses is famously good at handling a variety of terminals, but yours may be an exception.

I'm using xterm-256color / gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 18.04, as well as xterm-256color on CentOS 7 (via SSH).

If you run reset in the terminal, do you recover your original colors?

It does!

Also, it occurs to me that I should ask : do the screen colors you see when Find_Orb is running resemble those shown here?

Yes, that's exactly what it looks like.

Additional note: This happens both on my Ubuntu system where I run find_orb locally, and on a remote machine that I ssh into. When it happens on the remote machine, the weird colour-scheme persists even after I disconnect the ssh connection (it's not clear to me that that is necessarily surprising, but I thought I'd mention it).

[Bill-Gray]

Hmmm... just tried it in gnome-terminal on Xubuntus 20.04 and 18.04. The latter did cause me to see a compilation error that I'll have to fix (failed to find wide-character ncurses automatically), but neither misbehaved in the manner you described. I also tried ssh-ing into a CentOS machine; that also worked correctly.

In both cases, I was running a 'current' version of the source code... is that possibly an issue? It could be I had something messed up badly when this issue arose nine months ago and fixed it since then without noticing it. (Worth doing a 'git pull' and re-make/re-install anyway; various things have improved since then.)

Maybe it's an ncurses version thing. When running Find_Orb on an object, try hitting '.' (dot/stop/period). You should get some debugging text such as

xterm with 256 colors
xterm-256color
ncurses 6.2.20200212
65536 pairs of 256 colors
Colors are changeable
Using DE430/LE430;  covers years 1550.0 to 2650.1

If TERM is set to xterm-256color, as you describe, things really shouldn't be all that exotic. But it's worth a check... will give this a bit more thought and see up with what I can come.

[yangyang-studio]

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2021 十二月 27 15:32:36 GMT+08:00
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