Re: RFC: comint.el - comint-highlight-prompt and unreadable colors

[Miles Bader]

Jari Aalto <address@hidden> writes:
> Have a look at these:
>
> 1) On Windows, terminal Putty, which is very popular free SSH terminal.
>
> http://cante.net/~jaalto/tmp/bug/emacs/m-x-shell-color--win32-putty.jpg
...
> 2) On windows, displaying a rxvt terminal back to the Cygwin X11 server
>    from a Unix host using "-bg black -fg snow"
>
> http://cante.net/~jaalto/tmp/bug/emacs/m-x-shell-color--rxvt-cygwin-X11.jpg

In both cases it looks like Emacs doesn't realize that it's on a
dark-background terminal, and is using light-background mode (which
indeed defaults to a darkish blue for comint prompts).

This is a common problem, because Emacs generally _cannot_ tell the
background color on a terminal, so it has to guess; I don't know about
windows, but on X11 it defaults to assuming dark-background on terminals
unless the TERM environment variable is "xterm".  If TERM = "xterm",
Emacs assumes a light background.

Since rxvt sets TERM to "xterms", that's almost certainly what's
happening in the 2nd case.  On windows, I don't know, but it's probably
a similar problem.

You can override what background mode emacs uses by customizing the
variable `frame-background-mode'.

-Miles
-- 
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