Programming

I have to agree with the man page: the yellow is quite brown! But I disagree that it becomes anything else when combined with the A_BOLD attribute since all of my code uses A_BOLD everywhere.

It seems interesting that when I use YELLOW as a foreground color, it renders as a bright yellow, but when used as a background (even including the A_BOLD attribute), it renders as a muddy brown.

The same goes for COLOR_WHITE: it renders differently in foreground vs. background.

Seems like a pattern (i.e., foreground o.k., background muddy) until you look at COLOR_BLACK which renders as a medium grey in foreground, but a true dark black as background.

Those foreground/background colours are a limited set of eight colours each; foreground can be set to bold or bright to give another eight. That's it.
What you can do on a capable terminal is the "set palette" ESC- sequence to assign other colour codes to those FG/BG colours: Try echo -e "\033]P7ffffff"; this should set your grey background to shining white.

RudiC, can you give me some pointers to an ncurses description of "bright"? I can see the bold definition (A_BOLD) in the ncurses man pages, but haven't seen anything like "bright".

BTW:
On my system (Linux/Fedora20), I did a bit of checking. Ncurses says I have 256 colors and 256 color_pairs. I dumped the first 20 colors and got what you can see in the attachment below.

I was also able to get a bright white background by using color #15, but all attempts at getting a dark black for eth foreground failed and I am using color #19, a dark-ish blue. See the other attachment below.

Have you tried setting the inverse video attribute?
A_REVERSE along with a combination of the other video attributes.
Just an idea...

EDIT:
Another suggestion...

How about writing a simple piece of code to display the colours available like I did for the shell one which I might add did not show two other loops to __cross__pollinate__ low number foreground and high number background and vice versa...

Please take a look. I think these screen shots are pretty self-explanatory. Also illustrative of what I am experiencing: black foreground with any background is washed out completely, all of the standard colors as background are muddy, and seem to worsen when a black foreground is used.

Before going any further have you tried seeing if your terminal can create a bright white background along with black foreground, bold or normal?
An example using extended colours in some terminals.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
printf "\x1B[0;107m\x1B[2J\x1B[H"
printf "\x1B[30m           Print some text here...\n"

On OSX 10.7.5, default bash terminal this gives normal black on bright white background.

Yes, that works as expected. black fg and white bg.