Re: RFC: comint.el - comint-highlight-prompt and unreadable colors

[Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> Problem is: in terminal mode, menus are also more difficult to
> use :-( I wish PuTTY used a special TERM setting (or alternatively, I wish
> the xterm control-sequences included one which can be used to identify the
> terminal in use, and maybe even its background color).  Maybe we should
> write&submit a patch to X.org (or whoever is maintaining xterm nowadays) for
> that, so that we can use it in Emacs-23.

Yeah; someone mentioned that rxvt, while it uses TERM=xterms, defines
some extra environment variables.  I just checked, and I see these:

   # black-on-white rxvt (the default)
   TERM="xterms"
   COLORFGBG="0;15"
   COLORTERM="rxvt"

   # white-on-black rxvt (rxvt -fg white -bg black)
   TERM="xterms"
   COLORFGBG="15;0"
   COLORTERM="rxvt"

   # green-on-black rxvt (rxvt -fg green -bg black)
   TERM="xterms"
   COLORFGBG="10;0"
   COLORTERM="rxvt"

Not perfect (it would be better to actually get the terminal's whole
colormap in absolute terms) but that seems enough for emacs to do a
decent job of setting up the background type at least.

So I think Emacs could use the above information if it's present, which
will cover rxvt, and as you say, submit a patch to make xterm define the
same variables.

[An additional variable giving the whole colormap would be even nicer,
e.g.:

   COLORMAP="0:#000000,1:#ff0000,2:#00ff00,..."

Maybe we could try to submit a patch to export that info too...]

-Miles

-- 
I'm beginning to think that life is just one long Yoko Ono album; no rhyme
or reason, just a lot of incoherent shrieks and then it's over.  --Ian Wolff