colors work for ls, but not in man [SOLVED]

[Daniel Nogradi]

It was because of xterm. The file
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm was modified from RH9 to FC3
(maybe to other Fedoras also, I'm not sure) and as a result the bold
and underline attributes were not colored in xterm (for example man
pages were not colored). The solution is to put this in your
.Xdefaults:

*VT100*colorMode: on
*VT100*boldColors: on
*VT100*dynamicColors: on
*VT100*colorULMode: on
*VT100*underLine: off
*VT100*colorBDMode: on
*VT100*colorAttrMode: on
*VT100*colorUL: green3
*VT100*colorBD: blue3

which was in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm by default in RH9,
but not FC3. And then make sure .Xdefaults is loaded, for example put
in your .Xclients the following:

xrdb ~/.Xdefaults

And then you will have colored man pages and colored text in other
places where the bold/underlined attribute is used, for example in vi
the text -- INSERT -- which indicates that we are in insert mode, will
also be blue.