Re: ANSI bg colour outside of prompt area

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Feb 22,  4:28pm, Kurtis Rader wrote:
}
} Those were pretty much my thoughts as well. I have never once in the 30+
} years I've been programming wanted to change the default background color
} of an existing terminal session on the fly; i.e., outside of a particular
} app. This is something you spend a few minutes every five years or so
} deciding on your personal preference then set once and forget about it.

Many terminal emulators (more modern than xterm; e.g. gnome-terminal and
PuTTY, among others) provide GUI menus for doing this sort of thing.  In
gnome-terminal it's Terminal -> Change Profile, you can set up as many
different profiles as you like with different font/color/lines/columns
etc. combinations, and switch among them as necessary.

Of course "st" is designed to be extremely simple/lightweight, so it does
not have that sort of feature available.

The only other argument that the shell should get involved in this is
for non-GUI consoles.  I've seen reference to default console colors
having to be compiled in to the kernel, which does seem like overkill.
Even so, as Zyx pointed out, there's no way for the shell to make color
changes stick when other programs run.