themes

[Miles Bader]

The scuttlebutt has always been that the color-theme stuff is very
flaky, but since there's been some effort to set it up by default, I
decided to try it out.

Some observations:

  1. I normally have a dark-background.  Since the "tango" theme is a
     light-background theme, I did "load-theme RET tango RET" expecting
     it to change my background color ... which it didn't.  Instead, my
     window flashed, and some random faces changed, but mainly things
     seemed exactly the same.

     Is this a bug, or does this theme intentionally not change the
     background color?  If the latter, isn't that kind of awkward, given
     that themes seem to be designed for specific background colors, and
     look pretty bad when on some other background color?  [It seems
     pretty user-unfriendly to make a user change the background color
     himself to match the theme ... most will not even realize they need
     to do so.]

  2. The basic interface seems to be "load-theme", which also turns on
     the theme, and then you can subsequently use "disable-theme" and
     "enable-theme" to turn it off or on again.

     Isn't this kind oaf out-of-sync with general Emacs policy, which is
     that "loading" should only load stuff, and not actually execute it?
     
     Perhaps it would be better to deprecate load-theme for user usage,
     make `enable-theme' the main entry point, and give the latter the
     ability to auto-load themes (and do completion on unloaded themes) etc.

  3. Themes _seem_ to be stacked, which I guess could be nice, but is
     also kind of confusing.

     I wanted to try out various themes, so I did load-theme x,
     load-theme y, etc.  I then wanted to go back to my own settings, so
     at first I did "enable-theme user" which didn't work... then I
     realized that maybe I needed to do "disable-theme x" for all the
     themes I had tried; I did this, but I'm still not back to my
     original faces... Now I'm not sure if there is anyway to get back
     without restarting emacs.

     Anyway, I'm kind of confused.  Am I misunderstanding this stuff?
     Is it simply buggy?  Is this really a good interface...?

Thanks,

-miles

-- 
I'd rather be consing.