Re: face at point

[Tim Cross <tcross@nospam.une.edu.au>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

 
> > From my apropos searches, it seems there is quite
> > a few to choose from and can already see how to make a number of
> > alternatives work
> 
> If the ELisp manual in its node that describes display capabilities 
> doesn't explain how to do what you want, please submit a docs bug 
> report.  Thanks.
> 
Wow, this simple question I asked seems to have really gone off into
intersting tangents. Just to clarify a few things....

All I really wanted to know was "Which is the best/most
appropriate/accepted way of distinguishing between emacs running on a
tty, in its own X frame and within an X term so that I can set my
colours accordingly. 

The elisp manual is fine - I can certainly work out how to do this. In
fact, I can work out a number of ways of doing this and this is what
prompted my original question - I was wondering how others do it and
which is better. I've been using emacs for a few years, but am only
now getting into more "power usage" mode and teaching myself elisp
etc. I remembered seeing a thread some time ago here where a debate
broke out regarding why you should not use the window-system variable
to identify the type of system you are on and I was just after some
opinions on this.

With respect to the debate about choices of default colours - I'm
sorry, but I don't think there will ever be a resolution to this sort
of debate - there are too many variables involved, including
individual user taste, hardware, the workstation environment etc. I
think the best the maintainers can do is provide reasonable default
settings and clear documentation and ways of changing these defaults
(which has already been done). The great wonder of emacs is that the
user can customize all of this very easily, so long debates about the
default colours don't seem very productive (except in the academic
sense - always like a good debate). 

The one thing I'm very happy about and what I've always loved about X
and unix is that at least in most cases you can change default colour
settings and the changes are consistent. I am continually frustrated
in the Windows world where I define a colour scheme which I find
comfortable to work with only to find some applications only obey the
background settings for my scheme and ignore the foreground settings,
resulting in white on white or black on black or some other unreadable
combination!

Tim