On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> (Btw, I wonder why you use a black foreground for this face if your
> background is also black.  What am I missing here?)


> That's strange: are you saying that a 16-color xterm doesn't have
> "black" among the colors it supports?  I don't think I've ever seen
> that; perhaps the settings for xterm on your system deliberately
> define "black" as something whose RGB value is not #000000?

"black" to emacs is really color 0, which I have defined to be a dark
grey color (#2e3436) in my terminal (see attached screenshot). I do that
because it is a useful color to have rather than duplicating the #000000
color which can already be achieved by specifying no background color.

For the record, I'm using gnome-terminal with the Tango color palette.
When that palette was first intoduced, it had color 0 set to #2e3436,
but at some point they changed it to #000000 (which arguably makes it
non-Tango as #000000 is not found in
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines). But I still
customize color 0 to #2e3436, to have a wider range of colors.

>
>> So there's no way of explicitly specifying this background color in
>> Emacs unless I change my terminal's color palette, which would affect
>> the appearance of other terminal programs.
>
> What happens if you specify the 'linum' face to inherit the background
> from your 'default' face, like this:
>
>   (custom-set-faces
>    '(linum ((t (:inherit default :foreground "black" :weight bold)))))
>
> Does this produce good results?

This actually works. The background color of the parenthesis no longer
bleeds into the margin. Thanks!