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The ebuild mutt-1.5.6-r2 says
"If you want a transparent background, please merge mutt with USE=-slang."
However, I use USE="slang" and have a transparent background when I have:

  export COLORFGBG="default;default"

set in my enviroment.
So the "If you want a transparent background, please merge mutt with USE=-slang." warning should be replaced by a the following statement:
"If you want a transparent background, please merge mutt with USE=-slang or set COLORFGBG="default;default" in you enviroment. This can be done by executing
echo 'export COLORFGBG="default;default"' >> ~/.bashrc."

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. export COLORFGBG="default;default"
2. mutt


Actual Results:  
mutt with transparency

Expected Results:  
The ebuild says: "mutt without transparency"

Could you either explain the COLORFGBG variable or point to additional
documentation?  I don't understand the ramifications of setting it manually,
and I  don't want to put advice in the ebuild without fully understanding it.

Ciaran, any thoughts here?

If COLORFGBG contains the string 'default' as the last value, it's effectively
unusable (default could mean light or dark, or maybe some random colour). I'm
guessing that if mutt / slang can't handle COLORFGBG cleanly, it just gives up
and doesn't try to do anything at all with the background...

Setting it to default;default won't do anything majorly screwy, it's just not a
very good solution. It would be much better for mutt to provide some way to
make it ignore the background and use transparent, even if background detection
was available.

I just tried a few permutations. It seems that mutt/slang just care that
COLORFGBG is set at all:
For:
  export COLORFGBG="default;light"
  export COLORFGBG="default;dark"
  export COLORFGBG="default;aa"
  export COLORFGBG="aa;default"
transparency works.
For:
  export COLORFGBG="aa;aa"
it doesnt work. So the tip in the ebuild might be to set COLORFGBG to anything
valid to get transparency working ...

Try two integers from 0..15, like COLORFGBG="15;0"

Add the following to your profile:

export COLORFGBG="default;default"
for borne shell style shells or


setenv COLORFGBG "default;default"
for C-style shells

and it should work like a charm

Greetings,
       Thomas

This makes it sound like slang is related to rxvt.  Is that the case?

Also, does the default COLORFGBG setting from rxvt allow mutt+slang to be transparent?

*** Bug 68625 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I might be wrong, but I think slang was invented as a tiny variant of
curses/ncurses with midnight commander, because not everybody had a a good
curses library on the host. Yes, many people had termcap still. I'm not talking
much about Linux here but rather other Unixes.

Anyway, mc(1) had slang in its source tree, so if it did not find curses it
failovered to slang.

I believe on ncurses is much better and I don't see much reason why slang should
be preferred. ncurses offers a lot more. Why have two libs and term definitions?

ok, mutt-1.5.10 now ignores USE=slang, preferring to always use ncurses.