Re: About the :distant-foreground face attribute

["Jan Djärv" <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>]

Hi.

8 jan 2014 kl. 15:49 skrev Chong Yidong <seewhydee@gmail.com>:

> So if you care about obeying gtk_selection_fg_color, why not just set it
> to :foreground?  When gtk_selection_bg_color is in use, we might as well
> use gtk_selection_fg_color with it.  Users who want a region background
> color that works properly with font lock might as well disable the GTK
> selection color stuff (it's unfortunate that it's the default, but oh
> well).


You obviously don't understand the issue, so I'll try to be very clear.

1) Font lock uses faces with specified fore- and background.
2) When text is marked with the mouse, the region face is applied on (overrides) the font lock face.
3) If the region face blindly uses the foreground from the region face (as per your suggestion), for example gtk_selection_fg_color, font lock is lost.  That is what bug 15668 is about.
4) On the other hand, if we always ignore the region foreground color, and use the font lock foregrpund color bug 15668 would be solved.  However, if the font lock foreground and the region background is similar, text is not readable.  So in that case, distant-foreground is used.
5) When making a theme, I suspect one wishes to specify all colors, not use some arbitrary generated color, which most certainly don't match the theme.  So we need a way to specify that color, hence distant-foreground.

Your proposals:
1) Use the selection foreground color when the selection background is used
=> Bug 15668.

2) Disable GTK selection color stuff
This might lead to unreadable text as the region bacground may be close to the foreground.

There is no "region background color that works properly with font lock" for all font lock faces, because the colors in font lock faces are unknown, esp. with themes.

If you can get your scheme to let theme designers specify all colors without adding a new face parameter, via the display property somehow, that could be something.  Not that it would make anything simpler or a better design, it just sounds more involved to me.  Using generated colors is right out IMHO, it makes themes impossible to fully specify.

	Jan D.