Re: [RFC] color command

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Robert Millan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to discuss the possibility of providing functionality equivalent to
> the "color" command in GRUB Legacy.
> 
> One of the downsides of how color worked in GRUB Legacy is that internally
> colors were handled by GRUB directly as VGA codes.  Since this isn't portable,
> I suggest that we avoid it completely instead of just mapping them for
> platforms using non-VGA tables (I've seen that ofconsole is using RGB structs).
> 
> The solution I propose would be to have a "color" variable (and another one for
> highlight color?) with human readable names based on the list in GRUB Legacy,
> and let each terminal parse that and pull their colors during initialisation
> (this has the downside that one would have to reinitialise terminal after
> changing color, but this seems to be akin to the gfxterm / gfxmode situation
> and I think is reasonable).
> 
> Any comments?  Should I go on implementing that?
> 

Hi,

One idea was to define themable colors and then use grub_video_map_color
to map this to hardware (color index or RGB value):

http://grub.enbug.org/VideoSubsystem#head-0df1ed220076ff6cc8188d1a192a21d443cc2456

You could define normal VGA color with like
GRUB_COLOR_{WHITE|BLACK|LIGHT_GREEN|YELLOW...}. Then setup theme to map
GRUB_COLOR_CONSOLE_BACKGROUND->GRUB_COLOR_BLACK and
GRUB_COLOR_CONSOLE_FOREGROUND->GRUB_COLOR_LIGHT_GREEN. Of course we have
this missing component 'theme support' here ;)

You can make dynamic variables in GRUB so that when you set it it will
call function (which could call proper {term|theme}->set color function).

I would rather resolve this issue at same time when resolving graphical
menu issues (meaning within graphical menu subproject) (still looking
for more members ;)):

http://grub.enbug.org/Subprojects
http://grub.enbug.org/Subprojects/GraphicalMenu

Thanks,
Vesa Jääskeläinen