Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

Is there any reason for these differences for the "Basic default face"?

emacs-nox:
        Family: default
       Foundry: default
         Width: normal
        Height: 1
        Weight: normal
         Slant: normal
    Foreground: unspecified-fg
    Background: unspecified-bg
     Underline: nil
      Overline: nil
Strike-through: nil
           Box: nil
       Inverse: nil
       Stipple: nil
          Font: unspecified
       Fontset: nil
       Inherit: nil

windows-nt
        Family: Courier New
       Foundry: outline
         Width: normal
        Height: 98
        Weight: normal
         Slant: normal
    Foreground: SystemWindowText
    Background: SystemWindow
     Underline: nil
      Overline: nil
Strike-through: nil
           Box: nil
       Inverse: nil
       Stipple: nil
          Font: #<font-object -outline-Courier
        New-normal-normal-normal-mono-13-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1>
       Fontset: -outline-Courier
        New-normal-normal-normal-mono-13-*-*-*-c-*-fontset-startup
       Inherit: nil

AFAIK I've never customised or otherwise changed the face in either. The
difference in colours is quite a pain when trying to use a joint
configuration :(

-- 
Gary        Please do NOT send me 'courtesy' replies off-list.
GNU Emacs 23.2.1
emacsclient 23.2

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gary <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>
> Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:01:35 +0200
> Mail-Copies-To: never
> 
> Is there any reason for these differences for the "Basic default face"?
> 
> emacs-nox:
> [...]
> windows-nt

Yes: the former is a text terminal, the latter is a GUI session.
Emacs cannot control the fonts and default colors of a text terminal.
It can do that on a graphics display.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Gary <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>
>> Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:01:35 +0200
>> Mail-Copies-To: never
>> 
>> Is there any reason for these differences for the "Basic default
> face"?
>> 
>> emacs-nox:
>> [...]
>> windows-nt
>
> Yes: the former is a text terminal, the latter is a GUI session.
> Emacs cannot control the fonts and default colors of a text terminal.
> It can do that on a graphics display.

Can I persuade it to not do it on a graphics display :)

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gary <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>
> Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:23:21 +0200
> Mail-Copies-To: never
> 
> >> emacs-nox:
> >> [...]
> >> windows-nt
> >
> > Yes: the former is a text terminal, the latter is a GUI session.
> > Emacs cannot control the fonts and default colors of a text terminal.
> > It can do that on a graphics display.
> 
> Can I persuade it to not do it on a graphics display :)

I don't think so.  Unlike text terminals, where there's already a font
and some colors when Emacs starts, for a GUI window Emacs _must_
specify something, because there are no defaults.  AFAIK, at least.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Thomas Bulka]

Gary <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name> writes:

>> Yes: the former is a text terminal, the latter is a GUI session.
>> Emacs cannot control the fonts and default colors of a text terminal.
>> It can do that on a graphics display.
>
> Can I persuade it to not do it on a graphics display :)

I don't know if I fully got your point. But wouldn't be using Emacs
outside the terminal an option for you? In case you use two GUI-versions
of Emacs it might be easier to reach a similar appearance.

I'm not sure about your specific case, though, because I do not have any
experience in using Emacs on Windows.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

Thomas Bulka wrote:

> Gary writes:
>
>>> Yes: the former is a text terminal, the latter is a GUI session.
>>> Emacs cannot control the fonts and default colors of a text terminal.
>>> It can do that on a graphics display.
>>
>> Can I persuade it to not do it on a graphics display :)
>
> I don't know if I fully got your point. But wouldn't be using Emacs
> outside the terminal an option for you?

Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
"graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration working
with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
working with both.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Gary" <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>
> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:13:35 +0200
> 
> Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
> "graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration working
> with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
> working with both.

What exactly are the problems?  Your original question was about the
default faces, but now you seem to say that you have the faces
customized, and the results of those customizations are somehow
unsatisfactory.  Can you tell more details, or give a couple of
examples where the two versions don't behave as you'd like them to?

Basically, using identical face customizations should "just work",
both in the GUI version and in the text terminal version, except that
the latter has fewer colors to play with, so it will do its bets to
map colors to those it can use.  Also, the text terminal version
cannot use fonts of different sizes.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: "Gary"
>> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:13:35 +0200
>> 
>> Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
>> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
>> "graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration
> working
>> with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
>> working with both.
>
> What exactly are the problems?  Your original question was about the
> default faces,

Yeah. I thought that was a good starting point.

> but now you seem to say that you have the faces
> customized,

I hae *some* faces customised. Not the ones I initially posted about
though.

> and the results of those customizations are somehow
> unsatisfactory.

They're fine in one (console, where I actually did the customisation),
less so in the other (graphical). A couple of examples:

1. The background colour of the console and "graphics" windows are very
different - black vs. white (note: I'm not referring to the effect of
M-x set-background-color here, but rather the bg colour of the
window/console "behind" emacs). I happen to prefer a black bg for
working with text, but other windows lighter in colour (i.e. I would
also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg). That means face colour
contrasts are wrong when faces are customized in (say) console
emacs. Some text is simple invisible in the graphical version as a
result.

2. Because of differences in the default faces, the colouring of some
modes' syntactical elements is different between the two (i.e. when the
used face is the default face I started the thread about). In fact,
since a lot of faces use inherited values, won't that potentially affect
more than just those specific faces?

I'm wondering if the best way is just to
(setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/.emacs-custom.el")
because where emacs thinks "~" is depends on whether it is Cygwin or
Windows, so I can customize them independently. Not exactly DRY though.

Note: calling set-background-color in the console version, where I did
all my customisation, can have the pretty unpleasant effect of changing
foreground text colours as well (I guess there is some built-in contrast
calculation going on somewhere). For example the content of gnus'
"Newsgroup" header line is shown in dark blue or bright yellow depending
on whether set-background-color is called with black or white. So many
my lovingly declared colours and contrasts vanish because emacs now
"knows" I have a black bg, even though, actually, the colour of the bg
does *not* change (it is set in the console, remember). That's not a
total disaster, since I can customise them again to something that
contrasts okay - at least then the bg could be the same in both emacsen
- but I don't know how much that would help and it's a rather large
project if I don't know it will work. Any thoughts on that?

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Gary" <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>
> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:00:43 +0200
> 
> 1. The background colour of the console and "graphics" windows are very
> different - black vs. white (note: I'm not referring to the effect of
> M-x set-background-color here, but rather the bg colour of the
> window/console "behind" emacs). I happen to prefer a black bg for
> working with text, but other windows lighter in colour (i.e. I would
> also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg).

Does it help to add the following two lines to your ~/.emacs for the
GUI session?

  (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))
  (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))

> Note: calling set-background-color in the console version, where I did
> all my customisation, can have the pretty unpleasant effect of changing
> foreground text colours as well (I guess there is some built-in contrast
> calculation going on somewhere).

Yes, Emacs tries not to show you a combination of colors that would be
illegible.

> Any thoughts on that?

Not sure what you are asking here.

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: "Gary"
>> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:00:43 +0200
>> 
>> 1. The background colour of the console and "graphics" windows are
> very
>> different - black vs. white (note: I'm not referring to the effect of
>> M-x set-background-color here, but rather the bg colour of the
>> window/console "behind" emacs). I happen to prefer a black bg for
>> working with text, but other windows lighter in colour (i.e. I would
>> also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg).
>
> Does it help to add the following two lines to your ~/.emacs for the
> GUI session?
>
>   (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))
>   (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))

Not really. The effects is the same as, or very similar to,
`set-background-color black` - effectively I can't see very much as a
result. What I seem to effectively get is black text on a black
background.

>> I guess there is some built-in contrast calculation going on

> Yes, Emacs tries not to show you a combination of colors that would be
> illegible.

It doesn't seem to work very well :(

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Gary]

I wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> From: "Gary"
>>> I would also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg).
>>
>> Does it help to add the following two lines to your ~/.emacs for the
>> GUI session?
>>
>>   (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))
>>   (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(background-color . "black"))
...
> What I seem to effectively get is black text on a black
> background.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/RwAk4.jpg
The top part of the image is what some PHP code looks like, which
clearly isn't right (the bottom part shows selection and reveals the
"missing" parts of the code). It's kind of hard to write code while it's
like this... :P

Additionally, the minibuffer text is also black on black. So it's not
even easy to customise the faces...

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Stefan Monnier]

> The top part of the image is what some PHP code looks like, which
> clearly isn't right (the bottom part shows selection and reveals the
> "missing" parts of the code). It's kind of hard to write code while it's
> like this... :P

> Additionally, the minibuffer text is also black on black. So it's not
> even easy to customise the faces...

Use the force!


        Stefan

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Tim X]

"Gary" <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> From: "Gary"
>>> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:13:35 +0200
>>> 
>>> Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
>>> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
>>> "graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration
>> working
>>> with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
>>> working with both.
>>
>> What exactly are the problems?  Your original question was about the
>> default faces,
>
> Yeah. I thought that was a good starting point.
>
>> but now you seem to say that you have the faces
>> customized,
>
> I hae *some* faces customised. Not the ones I initially posted about
> though.
>
>> and the results of those customizations are somehow
>> unsatisfactory.
>
> They're fine in one (console, where I actually did the customisation),
> less so in the other (graphical). A couple of examples:
>
> 1. The background colour of the console and "graphics" windows are very
> different - black vs. white (note: I'm not referring to the effect of
> M-x set-background-color here, but rather the bg colour of the
> window/console "behind" emacs). I happen to prefer a black bg for
> working with text, but other windows lighter in colour (i.e. I would
> also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg). That means face colour
> contrasts are wrong when faces are customized in (say) console
> emacs. Some text is simple invisible in the graphical version as a
> result.
>
> 2. Because of differences in the default faces, the colouring of some
> modes' syntactical elements is different between the two (i.e. when the
> used face is the default face I started the thread about). In fact,
> since a lot of faces use inherited values, won't that potentially affect
> more than just those specific faces?
>
> I'm wondering if the best way is just to
> (setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/.emacs-custom.el")
> because where emacs thinks "~" is depends on whether it is Cygwin or
> Windows, so I can customize them independently. Not exactly DRY though.
>
> Note: calling set-background-color in the console version, where I did
> all my customisation, can have the pretty unpleasant effect of changing
> foreground text colours as well (I guess there is some built-in contrast
> calculation going on somewhere). For example the content of gnus'
> "Newsgroup" header line is shown in dark blue or bright yellow depending
> on whether set-background-color is called with black or white. So many
> my lovingly declared colours and contrasts vanish because emacs now
> "knows" I have a black bg, even though, actually, the colour of the bg
> does *not* change (it is set in the console, remember). That's not a
> total disaster, since I can customise them again to something that
> contrasts okay - at least then the bg could be the same in both emacsen
> - but I don't know how much that would help and it's a rather large
> project if I don't know it will work. Any thoughts on that?
>
>

The way I solved this was to put my face customizations in a file and
have that loaded by .emacs. For example 

(cond ((and (eq window-system 'x) 
           (not noninteractive))
      (set-face-attribute 'default nil :foreground "wheat" :background "black")
      (set-face-attribute 'bold nil :foreground "white" :weight 'bold)
      (set-face-attribute 'italic nil :foreground "yellow")
      (set-face-attribute 'bold-italic nil :foreground "gold" :weight 'bold)
      ...)
      ((and (not window-system)
            (not noninteractive))
       (set-face-attribute 'comint-highlight-prompt nil :foreground "cyan"
                           :weight 'bold)
    (set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil :background "blue"
                        :foreground "white" :inverse-video nil)
    (set-face-attribute 'font-lock-builtin-face nil :foreground "yellow"
                        :weight 'bold)
    (set-face-attribute 'font-lock-comment-face nil :foreground "green"
                        :inherit 'font-lock-string-face)
   ....))


Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

[Thomas Bulka]

"Gary" <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name> writes:

> Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
> "graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration working
> with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
> working with both.

Couldn't you load a color theme, depending on whether you start the GUI
or the terminal version of Emacs? If your main problem is the light
background of the standard graphical Emacs, this might work. Install
color-theme[1], choose a color theme with a dark background you like and
put in your .emacs something like:

(require 'color-theme)
(if (eq window-system 'w32)
  (color-theme-arjen))

This should load a color theme with a dark background if you start the
standard Windows Emacs. (Untested)


[1] http://www.nongnu.org/color-theme/