Re: Color themes

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:

  > Many of you are probably aware of a package called color-theme.el,
  > currently maintained by Xavier Maillard.  This package provides a
  > relatively easy way to choose from a list of pre-selected "color
  > themes" for font-lock keywords.  I think this kind of functionality
  > would be good.  For new users who dislike the default color palette,
  > there's currently no easy way to choose a different palette.
  > 
  > Ideally, there should be a submenu in the menu-bar, under Options, to
  > select a color theme (or whatever we end up calling it).
  > 
  > However, I'm ambivalent about how color-theme.el is written.  From a
  > perfunctory inspection of the code, it looks like it sets up some
  > infrastructure for defining color-themes that I'm not sure is a good
  > fit for Emacs.  In particular, it might be cleaner to define color
  > themes using Custom Themes, which were implemented in Emacs 22 and
  > meshes with the Customize facility.  I might be wrong, however, so
  > comments are welcome.
  > 
  > At this early stage, I haven't looked into the copyright assignment
  > issue for color-theme.el.  Assuming papers aren't a problem, I'm
  > thinking we could absorb part of the color-theme project, i.e. the
  > color settings that they've collected, and rewrite the theme-choosing
  > infrastructure based on Custom Themes.
  > 
  > Any thoughts?

One main problem with color-theme.el is that it smashes the face
definitions.  
With multi-tty and the default face definitions you can do things like:

emacs -f server-start

rxvt -fg white -bg black  
and in rxvt do emacsclient -t

then start another rxvt with a different fg/bg:
rxvt -fg black -bg white 
and in there do emacsclient -t

[rxvt not xterm with emacs knows how to find out the default fg/bg color].

All the emacs/eamcsclient frames in the example above will get the
correct face definitions for the type of display they run on. 
That does not work anymore if one uses color-theme.el (and quite likely
Custom Themes).

Just my 2 cents.