Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
> default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
> range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
> as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
> modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.

I also use a light foreground on dark background.  Several of the
default emacs colors are difficult and some are impossible.  Here are
some of the modifications I make.  Usually when I post something like
this others tear the suggestions apart as being terrible.  So beware.
They work for me.

  ;; Disable dark blue on dark background in minibuffer.
  (set-face-foreground 'minibuffer-prompt nil)
  ;; Disable nasty highlighting in electric-buffer-mode.
  ;; We use eval-after-load to make this happen after ebuf-menu is loaded
  ;; as that's where the "bad" definition of electric-buffer-mode is located.
  (eval-after-load "ebuff-menu" '(defun electric-buffer-update-highlight ()))
  ;; Have *Buffer List* use old-style header.
  (setq Buffer-menu-use-header-line nil)

> I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
> help solve this problem?

At one time one of the highlight modules had a way to specify whether
the default colors were light or dark.  I have lost the ability to set
this.  I have recently searched but it isn't immediately obvious.

At one time crawling through the code I found where the elisp would
try to determine the default Xresource values to automatically
determine whether it is a light or dark background.  I am guessing
that even if that worked that your use of -rv on the command line
would defeat that mechanism's ability to determine this
automatically.  Therefore I suggest setting these explicitly.

  XTerm*Foreground:White
  XTerm*Background:Black

Or whatever is appropriate for you.  It might even enable the emacs
elisp to do the right thing automatically.

Bob