Re: Background mode detection fails with rxvt-xterm, xterm and , konsole

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 25 Oct 2001, Hannu Koivisto wrote:

> After starting Emacs with -nw -q --no-site-file options in either
> rxvt-xterm, xterm or konsole (KDE's terminal emulator), (cdr (assq
> 'background-mode (frame-parameters))) evaluates to dark, so Emacs
> seems to have failed to recognize that it is running in "`xterm' or
> a similar terminal emulator".

Thank you for your report.

Gerd, it looks like this is due to this change:

  2001-07-10  Gerd Moellmann  <gerd@gnu.org>

        * startup.el (normal-top-level): Don't operate on the initial
        frame if we failed to create one.

That change made the entire block of code which, in particular, 
looks at $TERM and sets the background mode accordingly--made it 
conditional on frame-initial-frame being non-nil.  However, AFAICS, at 
that point frame-initial-frame is _always_ nil, since the code which 
creates the initial frame did not yet have the opportunity to run (it is 
run from command-line).  So the the code which detects of xterm and its 
ilk doesn't get run at all.

I'm not sure how to solve this, since the comment you added with that 
change says:

        ;; Don't do this if we failed to create the initial frame,
        ;; for instance due to a dense colormap. 

So obvioulsy, you had some problem in mind, although I cannot imagine how 
could anything bad happen at that point due to frame-initial-frame, as 
it doesn't yet exist.  I guess we need some other way of guarding 
ourselves against the particular problem which you solved by that change.