Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Burton Samograd]

Hello,

When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.

I build emacs from sources so if this has to be done in the C sources I
am fine with that.  I've tried (briefly) looking for a table mapping these
colors to curses colors but have had no luck.  Of course, doing the
remapping from elisp would be even better.

I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
help solve this problem?

--
Burton Samograd

Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Dan Espen]

Burton Samograd <burton@samograd.ca> writes:

> Hello,
>
> When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
> default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
> range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
> as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
> modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.
>
> I build emacs from sources so if this has to be done in the C sources I
> am fine with that.  I've tried (briefly) looking for a table mapping these
> colors to curses colors but have had no luck.  Of course, doing the
> remapping from elisp would be even better.
>
> I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
> help solve this problem?

If blue is unreadable in your terminal under Emacs,
then it's also unreadable when you do a color ls from the command line.

The point is, there are more programs than Emacs that use color in a
terminal window.  I suggest you fix the colors, not change Emacs.

If you're running xterm/rxvt there are x resources you can use:

!XTerm*color4:     Blue
XTerm*color4:     cornflowerBlue

you may want to change color12 to turquoise.

I know I did.

-- 
Dan Espen

Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Burton Samograd]

Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> writes:

> Burton Samograd <burton@samograd.ca> writes:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
>> default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
>> range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
>> as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
>> modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.
>>
>> I build emacs from sources so if this has to be done in the C sources I
>> am fine with that.  I've tried (briefly) looking for a table mapping these
>> colors to curses colors but have had no luck.  Of course, doing the
>> remapping from elisp would be even better.
>>
>> I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
>> help solve this problem?
>
> If blue is unreadable in your terminal under Emacs,
> then it's also unreadable when you do a color ls from the command
> line.

Yes, it is, but generally I run everything from emacs (include M-x
shell) so I honestly didn't really think of that problem.
>
> The point is, there are more programs than Emacs that use color in a
> terminal window.  I suggest you fix the colors, not change Emacs.

Good point.
>
> If you're running xterm/rxvt there are x resources you can use:
>
> !XTerm*color4:     Blue
> XTerm*color4:     cornflowerBlue
>
> you may want to change color12 to turquoise.
>
> I know I did.

I forgot about configuring xterm defaults.  That should be exactly what
I need.

Thanks.

--
Burton Samograd

Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Bob Proulx]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
> default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
> range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
> as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
> modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.

I also use a light foreground on dark background.  Several of the
default emacs colors are difficult and some are impossible.  Here are
some of the modifications I make.  Usually when I post something like
this others tear the suggestions apart as being terrible.  So beware.
They work for me.

  ;; Disable dark blue on dark background in minibuffer.
  (set-face-foreground 'minibuffer-prompt nil)
  ;; Disable nasty highlighting in electric-buffer-mode.
  ;; We use eval-after-load to make this happen after ebuf-menu is loaded
  ;; as that's where the "bad" definition of electric-buffer-mode is located.
  (eval-after-load "ebuff-menu" '(defun electric-buffer-update-highlight ()))
  ;; Have *Buffer List* use old-style header.
  (setq Buffer-menu-use-header-line nil)

> I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
> help solve this problem?

At one time one of the highlight modules had a way to specify whether
the default colors were light or dark.  I have lost the ability to set
this.  I have recently searched but it isn't immediately obvious.

At one time crawling through the code I found where the elisp would
try to determine the default Xresource values to automatically
determine whether it is a light or dark background.  I am guessing
that even if that worked that your use of -rv on the command line
would defeat that mechanism's ability to determine this
automatically.  Therefore I suggest setting these explicitly.

  XTerm*Foreground:White
  XTerm*Background:Black

Or whatever is appropriate for you.  It might even enable the emacs
elisp to do the right thing automatically.

Bob

Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[hjuvi]

Hello,

You can also try:

export TERM=xterm-256color
emacs -nw

Re: Changing Terminal (-nw) Base Colors

[Suvayu Ali]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 10:53:56AM -0700, Burton Samograd wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> When I run emacs in -nw mode on a black (-rv) terminal, some of the
> default text colors are very difficult to read, mostly in the blue
> range.  In certain cases I can modify a the individual color value, such
> as in the eshell prompt, but I would like to perform a global
> modification of the 'dark blue' color to be, say, bright yellow.
> 

[...]

> 
> I've heard of but never used 'color themes' for emacs.  Would these
> help solve this problem?

You could try the following colour theme I maintain.  It is designed
with dark backgrounds in mind.

<https://github.com/suvayu/.emacs.d/blob/master/themes/dark-emacs-theme.el>

To use this, set a custom-theme-directory and put the theme file there.
Then load the theme with `M-x load-theme RET'.  If you like it you can
add the hash to the custom-safe-themes list.  A note, you need Emacs 24
for this theme to work.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.