Re: Turning off colorization

[N. Jackson]

At 12:43 -0400 on Tuesday 2014-11-04, Richard Stallman wrote:

> M-x font-lock-mode will turn off colorization, but it's not a name
> that will come to a user's mind very easily. How about making
> colorize-mode an alias for font-lock-mode?
>
> Also, how about putting it in the Options menu?

I would be all for an easy/quick way to toggle "colourisation" on those
occasions when my buffer text is unreadable, but I find that toggling
off font-lock-mode does not help (on Emacs 24.4).

It's very rare to get buffer text that's unreadable[1], except when
reading HTML mail in Gnus[2] where I very frequently get presented with
a medium grey text on a medium grey background or a very dark text on my
normal black background. To see the text, I have come up with three
strategies, all of them annoying:

1. Turn my display brightness all the way up. (This will allow me make
out a few words if the ambient light is dim.)

2. Select the text so that it is "highlighted".

3. Use <menu-bar> <commands> <Washing> <Quoted-Printable>
(gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable) to display normal white text on a
normal black background.

After reading this thread, today I tried toggling off font-lock-mode
(and global-font-lock-mode) in an unreadable HTML mail buffer to see if
that provides a better solution. However it seems to have no effect
whatsoever on how the buffer is displayed. So providing a more
intuitive alias for it, or putting it on the menus, would not be helpful
(at least in my case).

It would be very nice to have the option of turning on an auto-contrast
function that would automatically adjust foreground or background colour
whenever they are too similar, along with a way for the user to specify
how similar is too similar. This would minimise (or eliminate) the need
to turn off colourisation due to unreadable text.

Regards,
N. Jackson


[1] I use the "wheatgrass" colour theme (not for any particular merits on
its part, but simply because, when I iterated through the built-in
colour themes after installing Emacs 24, it was the first one that
seemed to have things about right).

[2] Gnus v5.13