Why doesn the background highlight colour show behind white space?
This seems to be caused by an interaction between the slang library and the “reverse” video attribute that Mutt uses by default for certain mono/color objects, when Mutt is running on a terminal that supports color. (Mutt starts out configured to the “reverse” setting for these objects on all terminals, but will not allow the user to run a “mono” command to explicitly configure that setting [on any mono/color object] after startup if the session is running on a color terminal.) Some possible ways to get the background highlight color to apply to white space as expected: • build against ncurses instead of slang. • define TERM to be a mono-only terminal when running Mutt, e.g. TERM=vt100 mutt (making sure that neither TERMCAP nor COLORTERM are defined). • use color commands in the Mutt initialization file to replace the “reverse” attribute with color attributes for each of the affected objects. For example, the following would fairly closely mimic the default value of “reverse” on a stan
