Re: modeline face under a tty

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 10:22:57 -0700 (MST)
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> 
>     > Well, my solution is to keep the inverse video attribute and define the
>     > reversed colors. The problem of reversed color on X is solved by:
>     > 
>     > (set-face-foreground 'mode-line
>     >            (if window-system "white"    "magenta"))
>     > (set-face-background 'mode-line
>     >            (if window-system "magenta"  "white"))
> 
>     That's what I do as well, but Richard thinks it's wrong.
> 
> Doing that isn't wrong; what's wrong is Emacs's behavior.
> It is wrong for Emacs to make the user do this.
> This is inconsistent behavior, and we need to fix it.

That's what I meant to say; sorry for confusing wording.

> Here is another idea.  Don't set the :inverse-video attribute for
> `mode-line' on a tty.  Instead, reverse its colors as usual, so that
> the foreground is unspecified-bg and the background is unspecified-fg.
> 
> Then, at low level, this combination of colors can be implemented
> using stand-out mode, or whatever method would now be used for
> inverse-video.
> 
> The :inverse-video attribute would still exist, and when used it would
> work in a uniform simple way--by swapping the foreground and
> background colors in face realization.

I think we need to have a clear understanding of the desired behavior
before we talk about implementation.  So I suggest that we define
what would the result need to be for all the possible combinations of
specified and unspecified colors, both back- and foreground, both for
the default face and the mode-line face.

Here are some examples of the questions we should answer:

What will we do if only one mode-line color is specified?  What will
we do if none of the mode-line colors are specified, but one of the
colors of the default face are specified?