The colors aptitude uses to display various things on the screen can be customized to your liking. To change the color of the user interface element elt, you set the configuration key Aptitude::UI::Colors::elt to a group of two elements: the foreground color and the background color. In other words, to make broken packages red-on-black instead of black-on-red, put this in the configuration file:

Aptitude::UI::Colors::PkgBroken {red; black;};

The available colors are black, blue, cyan, green, magenta, red, white, and yellow ^[11] . You can cause the element to appear in bold text by placing “bold” in front of the foreground color; for instance, boldwhite. Finally, you can enter integers, which will be directly used as text attributes.

Putting it all together, a simple, if extremely ugly, redefinition of some colors would look like this:

Aptitude::UI::Colors {
DefaultWidgetBackground {boldwhite; magenta;};
ScreenStatusColor {green; cyan;};
ScreenHeaderColor {red; yellow;};
Progress {cyan; white;};
};

This would result in the following display:

[D]

The colors that can be customized are shown in Figure 2.10, “Customizable colors in aptitude”. The default for each color is given as a pair foreground,background.