On Jan 24, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Warren Harris wrote:

> 
> On Jan 24, 2011, at 2:32 PM, Perry Smith wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jan 24, 2011, at 3:11 PM, Warren Harris wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Jan 24, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Perry Smith wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I wish I could play with it and see what you are talking about and experiment around some.
>>>> 
>>>> What is TERM set to?  You might be able to set it do something more fitting to get better colors.
>>> 
>>> TERM is set to xterm-color.
>> 
>> I'm trying to recreate this as close as I can... your original post said you do
>> 
>> "emacsclient -nw"
>> 
>> but that would tie back to an existing emacs (I think).  Is that part correct?
> 
> Yes. I previously ran emacs --daemon.
>> 
>> Also, what version of emacs is on Ubuntu?  (And just for curiosity, what version
>> do you have on your Mac?
>> 
>> 
> 
> GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.20.1) of 2010-11-23 on yellow, modified by Debian  

I telnet'ed to a Unix system and then back to my laptop (Mac).
Started Emacs -nw and it came up in the terminal.

I get the same list for list-color-display that you got.  I have a
black menu with white text at the top.  My mode lines are black with
white.  My normal text is black on white background.  The *scratch*
butter starts with a "red" messages on white background.

All of these are muted slightly... the red is not full on and the
write is very slightly grey.  But it sounds like your grey is darker.

My guess is the terminfo on Ubuntu is not exactly compatible with
Mac's Terminal.app... but that seems rather unlikely.

My second guess is Ubuntu has modified emacs in this area but that
also seems unlikely.

I don't know enough about how the colors and faces all interact or how
to customize them.  Hopefully someone else on this list will pipe up.

You might try not using the daemon approach and, in particular, try
starting without using your init file.  Perhaps there is something
in there that is confusing things.

Sorry I can't be more help.

Perry