Changing the colors in pine


Pine (Pine Is Not Elm) defaults to white letters on a black background. While this probably made sense back in the days of CRTs and VT100s, I don't like it, find it hard to read, think it's ugly, etc. However, if you change the normal-foreground-color and normal-background-color settings in /etc/pine.conf, you get black on grey rather than black on white, which is worse than the white on black. To get black on white, change the color-style setting from use-termdef (or whatever it is set to) to no-color:
color-style=no-color

If you make the change in /etc/pine.conf, all users will see the change. If you only want to change it for yourself, make the change in ~/.pinerc. There's also a /etc/pine.conf.fixed file, but if you change this, it will prevent others from making their own changes in their respective ~/.pinerc, which probably isn't what you want.

08/18/2006