[REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[Steve Greenburg]

I was using emacs -nw in a terminal the other day and noticed that only the tsdh-light theme was able to give me a light background/dark text out of all the themes in etc/themes. This was a freebsd terminal where the default term has limited colors, and tsdh-light was the only theme that didn't check for a minimum of 80 something colors. It wasn't great but it was much more readable, and faster than setting -fg or -bg on the command line.

I think it would be a good idea to have a menu option in terminal emacs at least to toggle light/dark for easy of editing. My vision is impaired and I work best with light terminals most of the time. Probably the Options menu before Multilingual Environment. Someone said (invert-face 'default) can do this but I don't expect a casual user on bsd or otherwise would know about this. Possibly a command line option like -light or -dark might also work.

Re: [REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Steve Greenburg <beethoven3322@hotmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2020 20:00:46 +0000
> 
> I was using emacs -nw in a terminal the other day and noticed that only the tsdh-light theme was able to give me a light background/dark text out of all the themes in etc/themes. This was a freebsd terminal where the default term has limited colors, and tsdh-light was the only theme that didn't check for a minimum of 80 something colors. It wasn't great but it was much more readable, and faster than setting -fg or -bg on the command line.
> 
> I think it would be a good idea to have a menu option in terminal emacs at least to toggle light/dark for easy of editing. My vision is impaired and I work best with light terminals most of the time. Probably the Options menu before Multilingual Environment. Someone said (invert-face 'default) can do this but I don't expect a casual user on bsd or otherwise would know about this. Possibly a command line option like -light or -dark might also work.

There's a command-line option -rv, did you try it?

Re: [REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[Gregor Zattler]

Hi Eli, Steve, emacs users,
* Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> [2020-09-04; 10:06]:
>> From: Steve Greenburg <beethoven3322@hotmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2020 20:00:46 +0000
>>
>> I was using emacs -nw in a terminal the other day and
>> noticed that only the tsdh-light theme was able to give
>> me a light background/dark text out of all the themes in
>> etc/themes. This was a freebsd terminal where the default
>> term has limited colors, and tsdh-light was the only
>> theme that didn't check for a minimum of 80 something
>> colors. It wasn't great but it was much more readable,
>> and faster than setting -fg or -bg on the command line.
>>
>> I think it would be a good idea to have a menu option in
>> terminal emacs at least to toggle light/dark for easy of
>> editing. My vision is impaired and I work best with light
>> terminals most of the time. Probably the Options menu
>> before Multilingual Environment. Someone said
>> (invert-face 'default) can do this but I don't expect a
>> casual user on bsd or otherwise would know about
>> this. Possibly a command line option like -light or -dark
>> might also work.
>
> There's a command-line option -rv, did you try it?

nice, I didn't know, this is for X though.


I have this in my .Xdefaults:

!; provide inverse video
URxvt.keysym.M-plus: command:\033]11;15\007\033]10;0\007
!; provide normal video
URxvt.keysym.M-numbersign: command:\033]11;0\007\033]10;15\007

this allows me to select normal or inverse video within
urxvt with ALT++ and ALT+# respectively.  But this works
only with rvxt-unicode as terminal emulator.  Actually I
don't use it any more, because other configurations I have
made, provide colours and this does not work well in reverse
video.

Ciao; Gregor
--
 -... --- .-. . -.. ..--.. ...-.-

Re: [REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gregor Zattler <telegraph@gmx.net>
> Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2020 10:00:12 +0200
> 
> > There's a command-line option -rv, did you try it?
> 
> nice, I didn't know, this is for X though.

No, it's supposed to work on TTY frames as well.  But it became broken
in some version of Emacs, and we decided not to fix it.  Sorry, I
forgot about that.

Re: [REQ]Light/dark toggle for terminal emacs

[Steve Greenburg]

Yes the -rv option would be great for terminal emacs. If not then maybe amend the man page or something to indicate tsdh-light is the only theme that will work on low-color terminals like the ones on bsd?