Re: How to *completely* disable font-lock mode in my .emacs?

[Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com>]

I wrote:
> I'm sick of seeing light colored text on a light grey background, which
> I cannot read.


Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> The only known cases where it can happen is if you're running under a text
> terminal

Exactly.

> in which case there's no way for Emacs to figure out whether your
> background is dark or light, so it might guess wrong, in which case you
> should customize frame-background-mode manually.

s/it might guess wrong/it does guess wrong/

Why does it guess?  When it guesses wrong, it renders the text
unreadable, so the default assumption on a text terminal should be that
the user does NOT want color.  (Or maybe that is the default, but my
Linux distribution (Red Hat 9) has changed it?)

If I set frame-background-mode to light, won't that screw up my X frames
which have a dark background?  Is there an easy way to set
frame-background-mode to light only if Emacs can't figure out whether
the background is dark or light, as in the text terminal case?  Or, better
yet, to simply not use color on text terminals?

Thanks!
Eric Smith