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

[jari.aalto@cante.net (Jari Aalto+mail.emacs)]

* Mon 2007-03-26 Miles Bader <miles.bader AT necel.com> gmane.emacs.devel
>
> Basically, unless you have a proper frame-background-mode, then _all_
> the highlighting in Emacs will be fairly screwed up:  a large percentage
> of the colors used in Emacs highlighting only look good against the
> proper background type.  Attempting to pick "neutral" faces for
> everything simply doesn't work -- it's hard enough making things look
> good if you _can_ depend on the background type -- and the problem is
> even worse on ttys with their limited selection of color and alternate
> font styles (basically only bold, and often not even that, works).
>
> So even if we changed the comint prompt to make you happy, the entire
> rest of the interface will still look awful.

However, the problem is not so noticeable elsewhere. 

> If you can find a way to detect Putty/rxvt then Emacs could use that
> information, but absent that, I don't think there's any choice but user
> education.
>
>> Do you have in use cases where 'bold would not work?
>
> Bold is already used in comint.  But for the real problem, see above.

Forgive, I wanted to ask if there is any cases where 'bold would
pose similar visibility problems.

    (defface comint-highlight-input '((t (:weight bold)))
      "Face to use to highlight user input."
      :group 'comint)

    (defface comint-highlight-prompt
      '((((min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:foreground "cyan1"))
        (((background dark)) (:foreground "cyan"))
        (t (:foreground "dark blue")))
      "Face to use to highlight prompts."
      :group 'comint)

=>

    (defface comint-highlight-input '((t (:weight bold)))
      "Face to use to highlight user input."
      :group 'comint)

    (defface comint-highlight-prompt '((t (:weight bold)))
      "Face to use to highlight prompts."
      :group 'comint)

Wouldn't this work ecorrectly over variaety of terminals? 

The comint (M-x shell) is the primary interface to work fluently with
the shell, so is it's usability is a high prriority problem.

Jari