explicitly set bg color for every panel

[posita]

There are some themes where the current font colors end up being the same as the default background color. One example is the Solarized "Light" theme for iTerm2 (based on an input of { "foo": "bar" }:

Note how the "foo" key disappears since it's the same color as the background. Change the theme (in this case to Solarized "Dark"), and it shows up:

I don't know that much about xterm color sequences (or ncurses, etc.), but one thought is that if there is any explicitly colored text in a panel, consider also coloring the background of that panel using an explicit color to avoid the "invisible text" effect like the first screenshot above.