Re: face at point

[Tim Cross]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> Tim Cross <tcross@nospam.une.edu.au> writes:
> Note that emacs explicitly knows about this issue and maintains separate
> dark-background defaults for many faces, so any default face that's not
> readable on a dark background is a bug (of course in some cases it's
> just a bad decision), so please report if you can.
> 
> If you're using emacs in a terminal, then it's possible that emacs is
> confused about what sort of background it has (as there's no way to
> query the terminal for this info, emacs has to guess), and is using the
> wrong set of default faces; you can customize `frame-background-mode' to
> force the issue.
> 

Well...I guess in theory that should work, but my experience has been
that a number of faces are difficult to read when you use a dark
(black) background - in particular, there are a number of faces which
use variants of blue (navy, darker blue etc) and red or dark red which
are difficult to read. I found this under both X and console.

I'm not sure there is a lot which can be done here though - there are
quite a few different faces and many of them are not very good with a
dark backgroun, so I think the choice for default dark background face
foreground colours are limited.

I did find under the console, some colours just didn't show up right,
but expect thats a result of the limited colours available under the
console. For example, yellow without the bold attribute shows up as
dark orange on my console and only looks yellow if the weight is set
to bold - I figure this is probably either something to do with either
the video card you have or it is the only way you can have a different
in "yellow" between normal and bold. Note that other console apps like
colour ls show yellow in the same way yellow bold is shown under
emacs. 

On another point, what is the "correct" way to determine when you are
working under X and when you are working under a consle terminal.
remember seeing some thread in one of the groups which recommended not
use the window-system variable (can't remember why). For my setup I'm
using the function device-type e.g.

(if (eq device-type 'tty)
   ;;;do tty color settings
 ;; do x color settings)

To make the changes, I use the set-face-attribute function. 

Anyway, was just wondering if this is a good/optimal approach or there
is a better alternative (it seems to be working fine for me at
present). 

Tim