Re: Info faces

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 20:53:05 +0900 (JST)
> 
> The underlying requirement is to tell whether or not the terminal in use
> has a `dark' or a `light' background.

That's one implementation of that knowledge; there are others.

> That's basically impossible

I'd say ``impossible'' is too strong.  Surely, on a Linux console you
could access the video memory using an appropriate /dev/foo magic, and
look at the background color attribute of the text, no?  (That's
basically what the MS-DOS version does, except that it doesn't need no
steenking device drivers ;-)

Alternatively, we could forcefully set the background to black, as a
means to tell Emacs what it is.  (Also something done by the MS-DOS
port at startup, except that it sets the background to lightgray.)

> If it's impossible to tell that, simply knowing that the terminal is an
> xterm at least lets you set the default

Yes, that was the basic plan.

Btw, this reminds me: the tty version doesn't support the -fg, -bg,
and -rv command-line switches, because no one has written code to
handle those switches.  This should be fixed, and is fairly easy (the
code near the end of pc-win.el could be lifted almost verbatim), but
I'm not sure whether we should do it now or postpone until after
v21.1.  Gerd?