I have been concerned about the affect of glare on my comfort in front of the computer and using softer colors to give comfortable backgrounds to programs, for example I started this emacs session with -bg grey to make it easier on my eye. It does make a difference. This got me to thinking about choosing colors for backgrounding in X11 clients and on the web, as setting color for web styles in an important aesthetic experience. The reason I keep the text layout of my pages so simple and I don't use the more sophistocated techniques is that I perfer to keep layout unclutered because it helps my poor vision. For me most websites are too busy and hard to take in. There is a minor mismatch between web and X11 color names, but for the most part they agree.
So, I began looking at how to set colors by name and stumbled across a long-time Ubuntu bug that is appearently easily fixed. The file that contains the color names and their mapping to RGB values in /etc/X11 is not in the distro. Fortunately this is an ASCII file that can be had in several places on the web and saved as rgb.txt in the dir above. I had a number of color selection tools which worked by using the color name and depended on this file that began to work.
First, I cannot run emacs for X11 inside a terminal because there is no termcap database installed in Ubuntu. If I try 'emacs -nw' in a term, emacs complains about that. The command 'emacs' forks the X11 emacs (Xemacs?). So I looked for termcap in the Synaptic Package Manager, and came up with 'qemacs-nox' which looks like a down-rev emacs. It is good enough for when I really want an term-based emacs, Right now I am editing a minimal web page, and it looks minimally OK. My curiosity was piqued by the curses based menu that emacs -nw created on Windows Vista with Cygwin installed. That is GNU and since Ubuntu is based on GNU Debian it should also be GNU. The problem is that appearently backward compatability is not maintained or documented; I have issues with Ubuntu documentation about any backward compatability, the access to the termcap database is not maintained as I would hope. /etc/termcap is not installed and the package database does not make it clear on how to instlall it. Since I have installed many packages, it is easy to lose applications and install undocumented programs.
I broke Qemacs!I exited qemacs and tried to reuse it to fix a typo in this file, but it kept seq-faulting, nice! I'll have to look for a core file to send to someone; but it wouldn't surprize me if I don't make core files, that is usually turned off for Joe User. This reminds me that I submitted a bug on a KDE app. Even though my OS is down-rev, I felt that the problem I reported sounded like current problems. It forced me to try a different app. Qemacs opens under dired, and that it where it seg-faulted.
I find the way Gnuemacs is configured under Ubuntu alittle annoying and although I know that I can eventually find out how to change the defaults, I was opting for the convenience of running emacs in a terminal where a pleasing color scheme is already set up, when I discovered that I couldn't run gnuemacs in a terminal in Ubuntu. My first annoyance is that gnuemacs always opens the help buffer on startup cluttering up the screen with two buffers. I always have to go to the single buffer. I may be able to change that behavior. The other comlplaint I have is that I need to set the background color of the X11 cliant to something other than the bright white of the default, something I have already done in the file manager and in the terminal, something I thought I could do by simply running emacs in a terminal.
I was able to fix both of the above complaints. The command 'emacs -bg grey &' sets the background to grey for the xemacs X11 client forked from a terminal, I would have to make that the command run by every menu instance, and there are quite a few! The second fix is to generate a termcap entry from the terminfo entry for the term type associated with the $tern variable and append that to /et/termcap. The command is infotocap redirected into a file that can be appended to /etc/termcap. I was not able to figure out how to use a local termcap file and notcreate the system one, but I had to do that with sudo. As it stands, that works OK, but not without some glitches, after all termcap has been depreciated. The people at Ubuntu probably frown on odd codgers like me that would ever dream of wanting to run emacs in a terminal. I notice that there are menu items at the top of the screen. This is gnuemacs version 22 or 23. I have an OReily book on emacs for version 19.30 that says that M-X `(which did work) or F10 (which did not work) turns on the menu items in a subbuffer for completions in the terminal version. One of the glitches is that emacs in the xterm eaves copies of the cursor, a block cursor, scallered around the input. These do go away when you refresh the screen (C-l).
I also found that emacs in the terminal loses the syntax coloring which the X11 client sees. For example a file ending in .pl for a perl program gets the perl major mode and nice syntax colors in the X11 program that the terminal version of emacs does not get. That might be caused by the termcap workaround.