Re: MS-DOS color issues

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Tim Van Holder" <tim.van.holder@pandora.be>
> Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 15:52:32 +0100
> 
> > You need to remember that until Emacs 21.1, released only a 
> > few days ago, Emacs didn't support colors on a Unix TTY.
> > So all the color defaults in Emacs were for X, and the X
> > version by default comes up with a bright background.  So,
> > for the default Emacs colors to look good, the MS-DOS 
> > version switched the terminal to black-on-lightgray.
> 
> Understood.  But with tty color support now available, shouldn't
> the DOS and tty behaviours be made to match?

I don't think such a radical change is warranted, especially since a
large class of tty-like terminals (xterm and its ilk) use bright,
usually almost white, background.

> I'd simply like those customizations to be
> reasonably maintained when run in tty mode.  Which requires
> all X color names to be recognized.

I think this is impossible in practice.  Many proprietary X servers
define lots of their private color names.  There's no way we could
track all of them all the time.

If you want maximum portability, use the "#RRGGBB" notation instead of
a color name.  tty-colors.el supports that (as well as the
"rgb:RR/GG/BB" specification).