Re: Turning off colorization

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

>> So maybe Emacs could offer a way to turn off colors without turning
>> off syntax highlighting, at least in SHR. I think it would be
>> generally useful, but don't know if and how it could work generally.
>
> Yeah.  It seems like whenever somebody asks for stuff in this area,
> it's always "make all those colours go away", not "make syntax
> highlighting stop".  For instance, I would assume that people would
> still want links in eww to be underlined even if nothing colourful
> happens.
>
> So perhaps Emacs just needs another general setting here?
> `color-mode' (or something).  If that (buffer-local) variable is nil,
> redisplay would simply ignore all foreground/background colour specs.

The problem is that standard emacs faces seem to use only colors to
disambiguate stuff.  E.g., I've just visited an elisp file with emacs -Q
and keywords, functions, strings, and comments are displayed with the
very same font and attributes except for different foreground colors.
So simply stripping color specs would be equivalent to disabling
font-lock-mode altogether at least for elisp mode.

That's why I've suggested we might want to have a `no-colors' theme, a
`red-green-blind' theme that either use no colors but other face
attributes, or only a restricted set of colors, respectively.  Well, and
somehow those themes would need to adjust new faces as they appear,
e.g., when a third-party package is loaded, too.

Bye,
Tassilo