The colors and visual styles used by aptitude to display text can be extensively customized. Each visual element has an associated “style”, which describes the particular colors and visual attributes that will be used to display that element. Styles take the form of a list of color and attribute settings. This list is not necessarily exhaustive; if some colors or attributes are not explicitly specified, their values will be taken from the surrounding visual context. In fact, most visual elements have an “empty” style by default.

You can change the contents of a style by creating a configuration group of the same name in the apt or aptitude configuration file. For instance, the “MenuBorder” style is used to draw the visual border around drop-down menus. By default, this border is drawn bold and white-on-blue. Placing the following text in the configuration file would change it to white-on-cyan:

Aptitude::UI::Styles {
  MenuBorder {fg white; bg cyan; set bold;};
};

As you can see, a style's configuration group consists of a sequence of instructions. The general classes of instructions are:

The colors that aptitude recognizes are black, blue, cyan, green, magenta, red, white, and yellow ^[20]. In addition, you may specify default in place of a background color to use the default terminal background (this could be the default color, an image file, or even “transparent”). The styles that aptitude recognizes are:

You can select several attributes at once by separating them with commas; for instance, set bold,standout;.

	Note
	As hinted at above, the interpretation of both styles and text attributes is highly terminal-dependent. You may need to experiment a bit to find out exactly what some settings do on your terminal.

The following styles can be customized in aptitude: