meaning of "green" in gvim has changed

[SteveRiley]

Turns out (I wasn't able to check this last night) that gvim is a virtual package. There are actually three different real packages: gvim-gtk, gvim-gnome, and gvim-athena. Dunno about that Athena one, but the Gtk+ and GNOME versions both pull in several related dependencies. So I suspect you'll have to find out how Gtk and GNOME programs store color information and go from there. I would be surprised if any color definitions have changed on the KDE/Kubuntu side.

[jlittle]

gvim appears to be a Gtk+ program.

Thank you for your attention. One can build a motif version, I suppose, but the gtk build is more functional and has better support. A lot of folks don't use the gui version at all, they run vim in a terminal emulator with mouse support. But I'm used to the few gui elements I use. There is an experimental vim-qt project that I'm now slightly encouraged to look into.

I wonder if there's some Gtk+ (or possibly GNOME) tool for setting colors? Perhaps whatever talks to the GConf database.

I was lured down that gconf cesspit back on Lucid or Natty, I think, and ended up having to abandon the whole install. I'd expect that I'd run up against GTK2 vs GTK3 stuff. After that experience, and the Unity thing, I'd really prefer to keep as far as I can from anything gnomish, while keeping gimp, gvim and firefox. To investigate further, I'll install Ubuntu separately, so that I can install gtk stuff without messing up Kubuntu like I did last time.

I suspect "green" = dark green, #008000, on a Mac, I wonder if some Macness has leaked into Kubuntu.

Regards, John Little

[SteveRiley]

gvim appears to be a Gtk+ program. I wonder if there's some Gtk+ (or possibly GNOME) tool for setting colors? Perhaps whatever talks to the GConf database.

[jlittle]

Upgrading to raring has had a weird effect on gvim: the meaning of "green" in highlight statements has changed, from #00FF00 to #008000. "blue" is still #0000FF and red is still #FF0000, but "green" is half as bright. "green1" remains #00FF00.

Green is the only colour I've noticed, and I've checked a few with a colour picker; f.ex. "dark slate grey" is still what rgb.txt says it is, #2F4F4F.

/usr/share/X11/rgb.txt still has "0 255 0 green".

I've tried changing colour schemes, and other system settings, but nothing affects the colours gvim uses. I heavily tweak stuff using QtCurve, but if I log on to a completely uncustomized user, gvim's green is still dim. Same with the gvim from the repos, 7.3.547, or my own compiled from source version.

If I use the colour picker in a KDE app, such as kate or konsole, and use the "named colours" selection, "green" is still #00FF00, aka 0 255 0.

(I happen to use green a lot, a habit gained in the days of poor quality CGA monitors; because green is the middle phosphor of R G and B, using green would be less blurry.)

Now I can easily work around this by replacing "green" with #00FF00, or "green1", but it's strange.

Regards, John Little