How do I get a bright white background color with ncurses?

Question

How do I get a bright white background with black text on it in ncurses, similar to the title-bar in nano? All I can seem to achieve despite following the advice in another question (which has to do with getting bright white text on a black background, the opposite of what I want to achieve), is an ugly beige-colored background.

Images:

GNU nano's titlebar, what I want.

What I get with the program below. (Build with gcc -lncursesw -I/usr/include minimal_example.c)

#include <locale.h>
#include <ncurses.h>

int main() {
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
    // Initialize curses library
    initscr();
    // Enable colors
    start_color();
    // Attempt recommendation in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1896162/how-to-get-a-brightwhite-color-in-ncurses and other places on the web
    use_default_colors();
    // Make the COLOR_PAIR 0xFF refer to a white foreground, black background window.
    // Using -1 will not work in my case, because I want the opposite of the default (black text  on white bg), not the default (white text on black bg).
    init_pair(0xFF, COLOR_BLACK, COLOR_WHITE);
    refresh();
    // Get our term height and width.
    int x;
    int y;
    // & not required because this is a macro
    getmaxyx(stdscr, y, x); 
    // Create a new window.
    // TODO: Resize the window when the term resizes.
    WINDOW *window = newwin(y,x,0,0);
    // Try some other attributes recommended online, no dice. Putting this after the call to wbkgd() just makes the text look strange, does not change the background.
    wattron(window,A_BOLD|A_STANDOUT);
    // Set window color.
    wbkgd(window, COLOR_PAIR(0xff));
    // Draw a nice box around the window.
    box(window, 0, 0); 
    // Write some text.
    mvwprintw(window, 1, 1, "背景：不白");
    wrefresh(window);

    // Wait for keypress to exit.
    getch(); 
    // De-initialize ncurses.
    endwin();
    return 0;
}

I thought that perhaps there was something wrong with my terminal configuration (termite), but I was able to reproduce the problem in xfce4-terminal and xterm, both using the default configurations. The only way to fix this is to set my color7 and color15 to the same color as foreground, which obviously I do not want to do because that is non-standard and I want to distribute the larger application this code is used in.

(xfce4-terminal with the bug)

Answer 1

My recommendation is to define the bright colors (9 to 15) if there are at least 16 colors and can_change_color() returns true. Otherwise fall back to non-bright colors:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <locale.h>
#include <ncurses.h>

#define PAIR_BW       1
#define BRIGHT_WHITE  15

int main(void) {
    int rows, cols;

    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
    initscr();

    start_color();
    use_default_colors();
    if (can_change_color() && COLORS >= 16)
        init_color(BRIGHT_WHITE, 1000,1000,1000);

    if (COLORS >= 16) {
        init_pair(PAIR_BW, COLOR_BLACK, BRIGHT_WHITE);
    } else {
        init_pair(PAIR_BW, COLOR_BLACK, COLOR_WHITE);
    }

    refresh();
    getmaxyx(stdscr, rows, cols); 
    WINDOW *window = newwin(rows,cols,0,0);
    wbkgd(window, COLOR_PAIR(PAIR_BW));
    box(window, 0, 0); 
    mvwprintw(window, 1, 1, "背景：不白");
    wrefresh(window);

    getch(); 
    endwin();
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This is tested to work in Gnome Terminal 3.18.3 and XTerm 322, and it should work in all color-capable terminals if using ncursesw (although on some weird ones you might still get the non-bright-white background).