Restore the original palette on exit

[dankamongmen]

Now that I've added palette color support (#230) and am working on a suitable demo (#253), we have a crap palette upon exit from notcurses-demo. We need to restore it on exit. The oc termcap string resets the palette to the original colors. I'm not sure whether that means "colors on startup of application" or "default colors of terminal". Ideally I'd think we'd try to do the first option.

[QuLogic]

Unfortunately, it seems to be default colours of terminal, not colours from before the application started.

[dankamongmen]

Unfortunately, it seems to be default colours of terminal, not colours from before the application started.

Indeed. It would be desirable to get the colors from entry. I'll look into whether I can extract them on startup (in some cases, at least). Unfortunately, I seem to recall looking into this, and reading the palette on startup returns the console default palette. In that case, I don't see any way for me to retrieve the active palette, except perhaps for highly terminal/DE-specific mechanisms (which I'd really rather not get into if I can avoid them).

If you see this as a major problem, or even a minor one I suppose, feel free to create a new issue explicitly calling for restoration of the palette as we found it. I'll investigate what can be done. Thanks, @QuLogic !

[QuLogic]

It's not a super high priority; I was just trying to figure out how to stop ncurses from doing the same. I was looking at notcurses as an alternative, but haven't really committed to switching out anything.

[dankamongmen]

It's not a super high priority; I was just trying to figure out how to stop ncurses from doing the same.

Hah, I had the same question eight years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8686368/how-can-the-original-terminal-palette-be-acquired-preferably-using-ncurses-rout

Unless I've overlooked something over 9 months of Notcurses development (totally possible) and a decade of NCURSES development prior to that, there's no way to do this portably. Doing it properly involves horrors like extracting palette settings from gnome databases, and even then you're not guaranteed to be recovering the true palette of application start.

Sorry! Do let me know if you find out otherwise...but I won't be holding my breath =[.

I was looking at notcurses as an alternative, but haven't really committed to switching out anything.

Well, I'm currently trying to get Notcurses established, so if you decide to go that route, feel free to mail me directly (or here) with any problems/comments. I'll be happy to help you along.