Re: Colors on TTY (v26)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Aleksey Midenkov <midenok@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2019 21:09:56 +0300
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
>  > I tried different terminal names. It seems, that it understands "xterm-" prefix. The remaining part can be
>  > arbitrary: I literally tried "xterm-something" and it worked. I guess, there is no such file
>  "xterm-something" in the
>  > library. In any case, it's much better to rename terminal to "xterm-*", than deal with distributed files.
> 
>  Just do "ls lisp/term/*.el" and see what you've got there.
> 
> And?

And you will see what names are supported without any need to guess.
And if you want more details about how this works, I can suggest
reading the section "Terminal-Specific Initialization" in the ELisp
manual.

>  What do you mean "should not exists"?  The code is there, it uses
>  whatever knowledge it has when you call it.  Where you did call it, it
>  didn't yet query the terminal to see how many colors it supports, and
>  didn't set up their names.  IOW, you are shooting yourself in the foot
>  by calling the function too early.  There are various hooks provided
>  by startup.el which allow you to call this function when colors are
>  set up; do that, and Bob's your uncle.
> 
> You may call it anything you like, but this misleading behavior causes trouble. 

Yes, invoking code in .emacs which depends on stuff that gets set up
during startup can get some using to.  It does make sense, eventually,
though.