Buffer-specific background color

Buffer-specific background color

[Colin Williams]

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I want to set the background color for a specific buffer, but I can't get it
to work quite right.  I am able to alter the color of the background for the
face default using (face-remap-add-relative 'default :background "#F9F9F9"),
but if the text ends before the end of the buffer, so does the differing
color.  By contrast, (set-face-attribute 'default (selected-frame)
:background "#F9F9F9") will set the color for the whole buffer, but every
other buffer in the frame as well.  Is there a way to set the entire
background of just the current buffer?

Colin

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Re: Buffer-specific background color

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Colin Williams <lackita@gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to set the background color for a specific buffer, but I can't get it
> to work quite right.  I am able to alter the color of the background for the
> face default using (face-remap-add-relative 'default :background "#F9F9F9"),
> but if the text ends before the end of the buffer, so does the differing
> color.  By contrast, (set-face-attribute 'default (selected-frame)
> :background "#F9F9F9") will set the color for the whole buffer, but every
> other buffer in the frame as well.  Is there a way to set the entire
> background of just the current buffer?

Unfortunately there is no way to change the background color for a
buffer. I hope this will be added to Emacs soon.

In the meantime perhaps the simplest workaround is to use an overlay.
This has several disadvantages though:

- It overrides face backgrounds (since yet you can't have an overlay
with a priority lower than 0. I have asked for this to be changed in
Emacs too).
- It does not extend to the bottom of the window.

However this workaround is implemented in the function
buffer-bg-set-color in buffer-bg.el (part of nXhtml).