Re: default bg color on ttys

[Miles Bader]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> > Well, it *was* important before (I guess), but I didn't complain about
> > it, because I personally don't use any terminals with light backgrounds.
> 
> I'm confused: this seems to contradict what you said about using different 
> environments that require different backgrounds.

My *argument* is about the general case; my personal situation is not
the general case.  Because I was not, until now, affected by the
problem (as the defaults agreed with my environment), I didn't think
about it, and so made no argument.

> Let's talk specifically about someone who runs Emacs on a tty in several 
> environments, some of which require dark bg, while others light bg.  How 
> did that someone cope with this situation before the change that is 
> sensitive to $TERM?

Until this (upcoming) release, emacs didn't use colors at all on
terminals, so it basically worked equally well on all types of
backgrounds.

> And why won't the same solution work now?

Because now emacs displays lots of pretty colors (which unforunately
aren't so pretty if it is confused about your environment).

> I'm not against a command-line option in general, but I do think that 
> using them with Emacs is annoying, so if there's a better solution, I'd 
> like to find it.

Sure, me too.  Command-line option are merely a `less annoying' method,
not a perfect one.

> This is why I think it's important to understand the 
> situation where the problem arises.

All I can do is give the example my previous usage, where I would
normally use emacs on either real terminals (in fact, a real vt100),
or on a dark-background xterm.

However, not infrequently, I would telnet in from some brain-damaged
macintosh terminal emulator, or other odd environment, which used
light-background terminals.

So in that case, I'd set up my defaults to force a dark-background by
default, but for the case where I was telnetting in, it would be nice to
have a relatively painless way of overriding this default.

-Miles