Re: incomplete comment colorization in terminals

[Rob Riepel <riepel@networking.stanford.edu>]

On Mar 11, 2008, at 9:26 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Rob Riepel <riepel@networking.stanford.edu>
>> Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:15:14 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>> When using font-locking in a terminal window (xterm and the like)  
>> single-line comments are only highlighted to the first non-space  
>> character after a space.  This happens in more than one language- 
>> specific mode - I've tried Emacs-lisp and CPerl modes.
>>
>> The bug does not occur when running Emacs under X, only in a  
>> terminal, and only for certain terminal types.  The bug is present  
>> when TERM is
>> set to xterm or xterm-color, but not when TERM is set to  
>> xterm-16color.
>
> This is not a bug, but a deliberate feature.  There's a new face  
> named font-lock-comment-delimiter-face.


And On Mar 11, 2008, at 9:45 PM, Dan Nicolaescu wrote:

> A good way to avoid this, and the recommended way run emacs in a  
> terminal emulator, is to set TERM to xterm-256color.  All current  
> xterm compatible terminal emulators support 256 colors, when using  
> that your colors will look almost the same in the terminal as the  
> do in X.


Thank you, Eli and Dan, for educating me.  I thought I had read NEWS,  
but apparently not.  :-(

Many of the debian systems I work on lack the ncurses-term package,  
so I often cannot set TERM to xterm-256color or even xterm-16color.   
So even though the terminals I use support 16 or more colors I'm  
often limited to xterm-color (from the debian ncurses-base package).   
So I've resorted to this:

   (and
    (boundp 'font-lock-comment-delimiter-face)
    (set-face-attribute 'font-lock-comment-face t :inherit
                        font-lock-comment-delimiter-face))

I really like the color schemes that come with 16+ color support, but  
there's no "mode" value for --color=mode that sets anything above 8.   
Is there a way to set the number of colors that can be displayed  
in .emacs?

--
Rob Riepel
(650) 725-7577
http://geek.stanford.edu