Re: Font-lock.el uses strange value for min-colors (Was x-display-color-cells returns wrong number)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:03:41 -0500
> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> 
> On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 08:14:24PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > However, this sounds like a tip of an iceberg: are you saying that
> > list-display-colors will display a list whose length has no simple
> > relation to what display-color-cells returns?  That sounds bad,
> > doesn't it?
> 
> Um, no.  [I presume you meant `list-colors-display',]

Yes, sorry for the typo.

> Perhaps the doc string should be more clear about it [though I suppose
> technically it's accurate, as it makes no mention of being exhaustive], but
> the default behavior on X is to display a list of `interesting' colors (those
> with names).  Such a list is more likely to emphasize colors that are
> interesting to human eyes, and I doubt that anyone cares whether such it has
> any simple relationship to the number of possible colors when its length is
> above about a 100 or so -- you can still, obviously, use the #xxx notation to
> get any color you want.

I know that the list of colors displayed by list-colors-display on X
is fixed (see my message earlier in this thread), but I always
thought, I don't know why, that the length of that list is near the
number returned by display-color-cells.

If this is not true, one may ask what is so ``interesting'' about the
specific colors we show as opposed to those we don't.  For example,
when I work on Irix, I generally like to use the Irix-specific colors
(that are not shown by list-colors-display, of course) because they
are much more pleasant to my eyes.  So to me, those unshown colors are
much more ``interesting'' than those we show, in that specific case.

The importance of list-colors-display is that some people use it to
choose colors for their customizations, so the shown colors need to
have some resemblance to what Emacs can support.

Bottom line is, I think list-colors-display should display colors
whose number is close to what Emacs can use on that display, except
that it probably shouldn't be too long (so I don't suggest to display
64K colors, for example).  Perhaps a short comment to the effect that
we are showing only N out of possible M colors would be good there.

But this is not the gravest problem with this issue; see my other
messages about the value returned by display-color-cells, which I
think is the main issue here.