Re: emacs -nw niggles

[Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 9:04 AM, Richard Banach <
richard.banach@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

> | > * in the old days, it used the  'angry primary colors'  color scheme,
> which
> | > was great for someone with poor sight like me, ... nowadays pale pastel
> | > schemes are the default ... how can I get 'angry primary colors' back?
> |
> | Try M-x "customize-themes"
>
> i tried playing with that
>
> a) a couple of themes i tried looked pretty pale to me
>
> b) the customization only took effect in emacs running in its own
> window ...  in  emacs -nw  started in an xterm, the colours are
> different (for the same latex file), the customizations have no effect,
> and the keyword colour mapping (for latex keywords) is coming from some
> other place, which i'd like to be able to edit if possible
>
> | I have never seen "pale pastel" colors by default. What version of Emacs
> | do you use?
>
> it says
>
> GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.13)
>  of 2017-03-03 on c1bm.rdu2.centos.org


`emacs -nw` is subject to the TERM settings of the terminal it's running
in. Depending on your distro that may be an 8 or 256 color variant. I'm
suspicious based on your descriptions that your TERM setting may have
changed recently. The 256 color default them of emacs is much more subtle
than the 8 color theme.

You can see what your TERM setting is by `echo $TERM` and you can see how
many colors emacs thinks it can display by `M-x list-colors-display`.

FWIW, some terminals allow you to change the TERM setting to something else
if you'd prefer the 8 color variant.