Re: CVS emacs uses all the color cells

[Miles Bader]

Klaus Zeitler <address@hidden> writes:
> Has anybody observed a similar behavior? And what's the recommended way
> of using emacs when one has only 256 colors.

FWIW, I use Emacs (compiled with the GTK toolkit) together with Gnome
apps and Mozilla on a system with 256-color display, and everything
generally works wonderfully -- even my fancy background image etc are
displayed properly with a slight bit of dithering.  My impression is
that the main "color grabber" is actually GTK, especially when you're
using anti-aliased fonts and a fancy theme.  I have the
menubar/toolbar/scrollbars in Emacs turned off, but I don't think that
should make much difference, as other Gnome/GTK apps use the same
widgets.

Both Emacs and GTK seem to deal quite well with color shortages by
dithering or choosing close colors (the main exception is
gnome-terminal, which _cannot_ deal with a failed color allocation for
the terminal display -- it just uses black or something instead; I've
carefully chosen cutom terminal colors that I know will be allocated
succesfully :-).

The only problems I have are with some other apps that want lots of
color, typically to do their own anti-aliasing -- e.g., xpdf -- but they
seem to be a problem even when Emacs isn't running.  My solution so far
has simply been to run xpdf with it's own colormap.

-Miles
-- 
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
  --Albert Einstein