Re: customize-themes doesn't allow backquote or :inherit

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 18/10/10 18:54, Yavuz wrote:
> Thinking a bit laterally, there are 2 alternate mechanisms that
> could help (at the loss of some flexibility):
>
> 1. There are named colors, such as "royal blue" that one can use
> instead of "#RRGGBB" format. If it were possible to user-define
> more, that would be a solution.

This is possible on X11, but not in the manner you mean: Those named 
colors are actually provided by the system.

Emacs bundles a copy of a historic de-facto standard set of named colors 
for non-x11 use.  The set of named colors adopted by modern web browsers 
was also largely based on that set, with some small changes [1].

However on real X11 (at least x.org and friends), the set of named 
colors is user-extensible e.g.  if you place the following in  ~/.xcms.txt

XCMS_COLORDB_START 0.1
Blobby	RGB:7fe2/ffe1/331a
XCMS_COLORDB_END

and then

export XCMSDB=~/.xcms.txt

and run emacs in that environment, you'll have the color "blobby" 
available in emacs (and any other x11 app which uses the relevant x11 
color api).

None of that means emacs couldn't support internal user-defined named 
colors, or any number of other things [2], just pointing out where they 
currently come from.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names

[2] e.g. I suggested - not too seriously - note the "may be 
overcomplicating things" - an ability to indirect through alists when 
resolving colors last time the matter came up:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-08/msg00124.html