Re: How do I avoid purple-on-black and yellow-on-white?

[trentbuck@gmail.com (Trent W. Buck)]

Bruce Korb <bruce.korb@gmail.com> writes:

> I needed to use emacs in a terminal window that was in reverse mode --
> background black.  I was completely unable to read any of the prompts
> without highlighting the text because the prompts are all purple.
> Somehow, those two combinations need to be prevented.  Completely.
> Entirely.  Never allowed to happen at all.  It should not be up to a
> hapless user to figure out how to configure coloration.  It's too
> hard.  Thanks you! :)

Emacs already does this for red foreground in eight-color terminals,
which IMO is bloody daft.  If X on Y is hard to read in your terminal,
FIX YOUR TERMINAL.  Don't reconfigure all your apps to avoid X/Y.

For example, I have this in ~/.profile when $TERM is linux:

  ## Use tango theme in 256-colour framebuffer console.
  printf '\033]P%s' \
    02E3436 1CC0000 24E9A06 3C4A000 43465A4 575507B 606989A 7D3D7CF \
    8555753 9EF2929 A8AE234 BFCE94F C729FCF DAD7FA8 E34E2E2 FEEEEEC
  ## Use a darker white, so it can be distinguished from
  ## brightwhite without overstriking.  Use *black* black.
  printf '\033]P%s' 0000000 7AAAAAA

For urxvt and xterm, use .Xresources; for libvte terminals there is
usually a menu option under something like Edit > Current Profile.

PS: most Emacs modes have two default color schemes -- dark background
and light background.  Because it can't ask the terminal, Emacs assumes
all terminals are dark background.  The easiest way to override that is
"emacs -fg black -bg white".

PPS: that's from memory, mostly of 22/23, so may be invalid now.