RE: Icicles and prompt face background color.

[Drew Adams]

> Hello, I have a question on how to determine face used by Icicle-mode;
> it is used in the prompt and therefore I couldn't check it using
> `describe-face' etc.
> It is white background i want to change to a different color.
> It is displayed when i do the following for instance:
> Type M-. (find-tag), enter a tagname, enter
> then, if there are few places with that tag, I am presented with a
> prompt: "Choose a tag:", and when i scroll up down (with arrow keys)
> the minibuffer's background turns white. My normal minibuffer face
> color is yellow; that makes it yellow on white -- really hard to read.
> 
> What could I do? Could anyone help me tracing the color used?

`M-x customize-face RET icicle TAB' will show you the names of the Icicles
faces, each displayed in its own face (WYSIWYG). Just pick the one that matches
the face you want to customize - either click it with `mouse-2' or cycle to it
and hit `RET'.

If you can't tell by looking at the faces themselves, you can also use
`C-M-down' to cycle among them, showing the doc string for each. Or, perhaps the
simplest of all, simply hit `M-!' to see a Customize buffer containing all of
them.

However, none of the Icicles faces imposes a white background, and there is no
Icicles face that governs what you describe.

I suspect that what is happening is this:

By default, when you cycle among completion candidates, the part of the current
candidate from the end of your input (the root) to the end of the candidate is
preselected as the active region (so that you can easily delete it). The
`region' face is used for this.

If option `icicle-change-region-background-flag' is non-nil (the default), and
if you also use library `hexrgb.el', then Icicles changes the `region' face
background during minibuffer input, to make it less distracting: it will then be
only slightly different from your normal background. 

If this is indeed what's behind what you're seeing, then you can do any one of
these things to remedy it:

1. Download and put `hexrgb.el' in your `load-path'. The region will then
automatically be only slightly different from your normal background, during
minibuffer input. It will be noticeable enough that you can tell the text is
selected, but not so noticeable that it is hard to read.

2. Customize `icicle-region-background', so the `region' face appears the way
you want during minibuffer input.

3. Customize `icicle-change-region-background-flag' to nil. The normal `region'
face will then be used (no change to its background).

4. Customize `icicle-point-position-in-candidate' or
`icicle-mark-position-in-candidate', so that the region is empty in this
context.

Each of those approaches has a different effect, but you can use any of them.
This doc describes all of this, with screenshots:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Customization_and_General_Tips#toc9

HTH. Let me know, if not.