[Solved] Changing window focus makes kakoune permanently dark blue

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1

Problem

Whenever I change focus to a different window, or change the size of the kakoune window, kakoune looks like it has a very dark blue filter infront of it and I can only get rid of it by restarting the instance.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

2

Is your terminal emulator Konsole, or some other terminal using the QTerminal library? Are you using a custom colour scheme?

3

Nope, zsh.
But yea, color scheme. It was caksoylar/kakoune-mysticaltutor, but just commented the line and restarted and it works. Should have thought of that.
Thanks.
Loving kakoune so far though!

4

Just to be clear, zsh is a shell that runs inside a terminal emulator. zsh is responsible for printing a prompt, the terminal emulator is responsible for choosing which font to display it in, what size to draw it, and what colour.

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5

Ah, yea, true. Then I’m using st, unless I got something else mixed up.

6

Comparing the xterm-256color terminal info database entry with st’s:

$ infocmp -1x xterm-256color st | grep ccc
	ccc: T:F.

…we can see that while xterm’s entry has the Can Change Colour (ccc) flag set to True, st has it set to False. If you run your terminal with $TERM set to xterm-256color, apps will assume they can change the palette of terminal colours, silently fail, and probably wind up using the colours that default to shades of dark blue.

You could:

  • Use a colour-scheme that only uses the basic 16 terminal colours, instead of using specific RGB colours
  • set $TERM to “st” instead of “xterm-256color”, which more accurately represents the terminal’s capabilities, but is less widely supported if you need to SSH to a remote host or something
    • this doesn’t actually make RGB colours work, but it should prevent them from breaking in such an unusable way
  • Use the latest Git versions of Kakoune, which uses terminals’ 24-bit colour support instead of trying to modify the 256-colour palette (this should be in the next official release of Kakoune, coming soon hopefully)
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