I see.  Thanks for clarifying.  In my original e-mail I also forgot to
mention that the advice of Peter Dyballa to use a .emacs for customization
was the correct advice.  Thanks Peter.  I got the idea to use
~/.emacs/init.el from the Emacs Starter Kit (
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/ ).  Presumably it is no
substitute for .emacs.

Thanks again everyone,

Nathan

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> > Hi guys, thanks for replying.  If anyone out there is still
> > searching, I finally figured out that apparently in Emacs 24
> > color-theme is (slightly?) deprecated.
>
> No, color-theme is not at all deprecated.  It has never been part of GNU
> Emacs,
> so GNU Emacs cannot deprecate it.  It is a third-party library,
> color-theme.el,
> and it is still available AFAIK.
>
> What is unfortunate is that GNU Emacs adopted a name, "custom theme", that
> is so
> close to "color theme", which already has a certain following.
>
> Every few weeks someone posts here with questions that involve confusion
> between
> the two.
>
> (Emacs has had "custom themes" for a long time, but until Emacs 24 they had
> nothing to do with colors (as in "color theme").  It is the combination of
> Emacs
> 24 adopting something similar to what color-theme.el offers plus its
> inclusion
> of that new feature in the grab bag called "custom themes" that seems to
> lead to
> the confusion.)
>
>