Re: emacs -nw conflicts with (set-foreground-color "xxx")

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 09.10.2007 um 06:27 schrieb sigma.sullivan:

> Does this make any sense?  How can I get rid of the color
> modification?

I don't know ... One thing that I can imagine being the cause is,  
that all these extra colours in your console application come from  
the X server. When GNU Emacs or some other ncurses based programme  
runs in this terminal emulation, it has no access to X11 and is  
restricted to the use of ANSI defined colours ("ESC [ 3 7 m ESC [ 4 0  
m" or such codes). It might be possible that an extended "termcap  
entry" describes capabilities to access much more colours, but then  
this entry's name would be needed to be defined as the environment  
variable TERM. An auxiliary environment variable TERMCAP or TERMPATH  
might point to that powerful entry.

Please check what your console application really offers "simple"  
ncurses based non-graphic or alpha-numeric programmes!


I'd make tests with GNU Emacs launched with -Q, i.e. to get an Emacs  
running that has none of your system's or your own customisation  
loaded. On the command line you can try -fg and -bg to set foreground  
or background colour, you can also make GNU Emacs load an ELisp file  
with the two simple statements, or you can make it to execute the  
same statements on the command line.

If the colours are still different from those that list-colors- 
display shows, than you've probably found something like a bug and  
should report it via Help menu -> Send Bug Report... Then describe  
the original cause and what you've did and found when testing GNU  
Emacs launched with -Q. You can start the bug report when still in  
emacs -Q ...


(Personally I don't see any reason why GNU Emacs, when running  
without windows inside a terminal emulation, should use other colours  
then those I've chosen for the host, i.e. the terminal emulation. Its  
colours are already chosen for ergonomic reasons and personal  
preferences. Nevertheless, I had problems that the default colours  
and faces from font-lock were far away from readable. For this  
purpose I positioned the cursor in some major-mode in such an  
unreadable text and typed C-u C-x =. In another window this text was  
described – and also its face was mentioned, offering a direct way to  
the customisation interface. This way I re-customised some colours  
and saved them in a file that gets loaded when GNU Emacs is running  
with window-system "nil." To prepare this work just remove this  
original section from your user init file, ~/.emacs for example,  
starting with

        (custom-set-faces
          ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
          ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
          ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
          ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.


and set right whatever you think needs correction. Then save your new  
customisation and put the section in another file. Load your  
customisation via, for example


      (setq custom-file (format "~/.emacs-Abrichtung-%d.el" ETyp))
      (load custom-file)
      (load (format "~/.emacs_%s" mWS))

where ETyp corresponds to something like emacs-major-version [I have  
a few Emacsen] and mWS corresponds to the window-system in which it  
runs.)


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  Pete       ~~_\\_/%
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