# CPP / ncurses: How to highlight arbitrary supported color with arbitrary supported background?

**URL:** <https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/cpp-ncurses-how-to-highlight-arbitrary-supported-color-with-arbitrary-supported-background/18606>\
**Category:** The Toolbox\
**Created:** [January 30, 2019, 7:38am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/cpp-ncurses-how-to-highlight-arbitrary-supported-color-with-arbitrary-supported-background/18606 "2019-01-30T07:38:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![int\_ua](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/int_ua/32/4402_2.png) [@int\_ua](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/int_ua)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2019, 7:38am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/cpp-ncurses-how-to-highlight-arbitrary-supported-color-with-arbitrary-supported-background/18606/1 "2019-01-30T07:38:56Z")

</div>

I’m having trouble figuring out how to have these color pairs for displaying weather overmap:  
(Foreground / Background)  
light\_blue / light\_gray  
blue / dark\_gray  
light\_green / light\_gray  
green / dark\_gray  
white / light\_gray  
white / dark\_gray

Do I understand correctly that it’s in theory possible because [all of these colors](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/046b8c053dd5a27b4ee54a7bc770e9601db6503b/doc/COLOR.md) are supported by curses? Are `light` colors not supported as backgrounds for some reason? Is there a function that will combine two colors without having every single pair defined in color.h? Or will I have to define all non-existent pairs myself? Code looks completely unintuitive, unfortunately.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![int\_ua](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/int_ua/32/4402_2.png) [@int\_ua](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/int_ua)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2019, 1:21pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/cpp-ncurses-how-to-highlight-arbitrary-supported-color-with-arbitrary-supported-background/18606/2 "2019-01-30T13:21:07Z")

</div>

What I completely missed is the Color manager. Problem is solved. It should be mentioned in `COLOR.md`. What I don’t understand is that colors in-game differ so much from what they are called in code.