Re: face at point

[Fredrik Staxeng]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>> From: Fredrik Staxeng <fstx+u@update.uu.se>
>> Date: 20 Nov 2002 14:37:52 +0100
>> 
>> - A way to emulate tty color when on X. That is, an Emacs maintainer 
>>   could just do M-x color-restrict to see if his faces get mapped
>>   reasonably.
>
>What I normally do is run "emacs -nw" from xterm.  The CVS code has a
>way of forcing Emacs on a tty to use 8 colors even if the display
>supports more (some versions of xterm support up to 256 colors).
>This option only works in a non-windowed session, thus -nw.

The easier it is, the more checking is likely to be done. Perhaps
the CVS way is easy enough that it will happen.

>> - That Emacs consider both foreground and background pairs, and changes
>>   those that has been troublesome. E.g yellow:white -> red:white.
>
>This might or might not be a good idea, I really don't know.  Suppose
>the user really wants yellow on white--is it okay for Emacs to "know
>better"?
>
>For the default faces, this is already done manually: when the X
>definition maps to something barely readable, like yellow on white, a
>tty-specific definition is introduced with different colors.

I was thinking that a tty user could add/remove pairs in the blacklist.
It does seem to be cumbersome to need to first change the the face, and
then change the blacklist.

>> - I also think that it would be good to have a color picker for X,
>>   that lets the user select from the 6x6x6 cube, and possibly modifying
>>   the color. This is a much better way of selecting colors than 
>>   reading rgb.txt and trial and error.
>
>Emacs has `list-colors-display' and `list-faces-display' which I
>think greatly simplify the process of customizing face colors.  Isn't
>that a worthy equivalent of a color cube you envision?

Except that 216 colors fit nicely in relatively small area. Look at xcmap
(not in the X distribution anymore it seems). 

Something like 

+--------------------------------------------- +
| +-----------+  +------------+ +-----------+  |
| |  list of  |  |            | |           |  |
| |  faces    |  | fg picker  | | bg picker |  |
| |           |  |            | |           |  |
| |           +  +------------+ +-----------+  |
| |           |  rgb fields      rgb fields
| +-----------+  fields for other attributes   |
+----------------------------------------------+

If you put this in one window, and have your C code in the other window,
and any changes you do apply immediately, selecting a set of good faces
would take about two minutes, _including_ learning how to do it. 
Have _one_ save button, and _one_ undo button that reverts to the saved
settings.

Oh, the face names should be rendered in the face.

For extra points, when the cursor is in the C buffer, select the 
corresponding face in the face buffer. 

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: sfgk@hcqngr.hh.fr