Re: Face differences between emacs-nox & windows-nt

["Gary" <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: "Gary"
>> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:13:35 +0200
>> 
>> Basically I have two versions - one the standard Windows emacs from
>> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ and the other the Cygwin emacs - one
>> "graphical" and one console. I have got most of my configuration
> working
>> with both, only the faces (particularly the colours) aren't happily
>> working with both.
>
> What exactly are the problems?  Your original question was about the
> default faces,

Yeah. I thought that was a good starting point.

> but now you seem to say that you have the faces
> customized,

I hae *some* faces customised. Not the ones I initially posted about
though.

> and the results of those customizations are somehow
> unsatisfactory.

They're fine in one (console, where I actually did the customisation),
less so in the other (graphical). A couple of examples:

1. The background colour of the console and "graphics" windows are very
different - black vs. white (note: I'm not referring to the effect of
M-x set-background-color here, but rather the bg colour of the
window/console "behind" emacs). I happen to prefer a black bg for
working with text, but other windows lighter in colour (i.e. I would
also like my graphical emacs to have a black bg). That means face colour
contrasts are wrong when faces are customized in (say) console
emacs. Some text is simple invisible in the graphical version as a
result.

2. Because of differences in the default faces, the colouring of some
modes' syntactical elements is different between the two (i.e. when the
used face is the default face I started the thread about). In fact,
since a lot of faces use inherited values, won't that potentially affect
more than just those specific faces?

I'm wondering if the best way is just to
(setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/.emacs-custom.el")
because where emacs thinks "~" is depends on whether it is Cygwin or
Windows, so I can customize them independently. Not exactly DRY though.

Note: calling set-background-color in the console version, where I did
all my customisation, can have the pretty unpleasant effect of changing
foreground text colours as well (I guess there is some built-in contrast
calculation going on somewhere). For example the content of gnus'
"Newsgroup" header line is shown in dark blue or bright yellow depending
on whether set-background-color is called with black or white. So many
my lovingly declared colours and contrasts vanish because emacs now
"knows" I have a black bg, even though, actually, the colour of the bg
does *not* change (it is set in the console, remember). That's not a
total disaster, since I can customise them again to something that
contrasts okay - at least then the bg could be the same in both emacsen
- but I don't know how much that would help and it's a rather large
project if I don't know it will work. Any thoughts on that?