Re: default bg color on ttys

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Miles Bader wrote:

> > Let's talk specifically about someone who runs Emacs on a tty in several 
> > environments, some of which require dark bg, while others light bg.  How 
> > did that someone cope with this situation before the change that is 
> > sensitive to $TERM?
> 
> Until this (upcoming) release, emacs didn't use colors at all on
> terminals

I meant the CVS code, not Emacs 20.x.

Are you saying that no one with access to the development sources ever 
faced this problem (otherwise they would have complained by now)?  If so, 
perhaps we are trying to solve a largely non-existent problem, and we 
might be better off waiting for someone to complain based on their real 
experience (and provide the necessary details which we are now trying to 
second-guess)?

> So in that case, I'd set up my defaults to force a dark-background by
> default, but for the case where I was telnetting in, it would be nice to
> have a relatively painless way of overriding this default.

I'd say that .emacs is quite adequate here: either you can detect the 
nature of the telnet client, e.g. by looking at $TERM, like startup.el 
does, or you could change the background mode by invoking some function 
from within Emacs, if only you, the user, know what the current mode 
should be.

Perhaps we need to add a command to set the background mode, if M-x 
customize is deemed too awkward for this.

Btw, note that current defface's almost always define tty colors
independent of the background mode, so changing the background mode
is only the tip of an iceberg...