CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacscustomizationemacs-faces
sudo
sudo

Reputation: 647

Change Emacs' background color

I have a function that sets Emacs' color theme to a theme defined by myself. In this function I do:

(set-face-attribute 'default cur-frame :foreground fg-color :background bg-color)

I then set the background color, foreground color, and cursor color for default-frame-alist, initial-frame-alist and special-display-frame-alist.

All of this works fine on my Mac. But when I use this on Linux, it looks fine for all frames that have already been opened, but on newly created frames it looks like this:

background color issue

I do not have this problem with new frames if use the set-background-color / set-foreground-color functions instead of (set-face-attribute 'default ...). But if I do that I have to manually reset the colors for every frame that's already open.

I am using Emacs version 23.3 on both Mac and Ubuntu.

For clarification, this is the theme file I use:

my-color.el

Upvotes: 6

Views: 15479

Answers (4)

Jonas Berlin
Jonas Berlin

Reputation: 3482

Emacs uses1) (or does not paint over) the Gtk3.0 theme background in more recent Emacs versions. Changing background using e.g. set-background-color or default-frame-alist only works until I resize the window, after which the Gtk theme background "shines through" again.

I have not yet been able to figure out how to get emacs to always paint over the Gtk theme background, but at least I have found a way how to change the Gtk theme background color, for Emacs only: https://superuser.com/questions/699501/emacs-showing-grey-background-where-there-are-no-characters/937749#937749

So this does not fully solve changing the background color when you switch themes, but at least you can get rid of the black-white contrast you experience when opening new frames.

1) on my machine at least :)

Upvotes: 0

sudo
sudo

Reputation: 647

It seems that it's better to use

(custom-set-faces
  '(default ... )
  '(region ... )
  ....
)

style to set faces, this way it will not have that problem.

Upvotes: 1

Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 71

set-face-attribute sets, as the name suggest, the attributes of a face (i.e., font-related properties), not the attributes of the frame. Use

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(background-color . "lightgray"))

and similar to change frame-related properties.

Upvotes: 6

vpit3833
vpit3833

Reputation: 7951

(if (eq system-type 'darwin)
    ;; mac os x settings
  (if (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
    (setq default-frame-alist '((background-color . "black")
                                (foreground-color . "gray")))))

something like this should help you maintain settings per OS.

Upvotes: 3

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