Emacs Colors are driving me crazy!

[Michael M Mason]

On Fri, 09 Aug 2002 02:04:09 -0000, TuxTrax at fortress.tuxnet.net
(TuxTrax) wrote:

>I went into KDE control panel, and changed some settings for the look and
>feel. One of the settings I changed is the "apply fonts and colors to non
>KDE applications". I checked that box.
>
>The next time I ran Emacs, all text is in a reverse-like format. the letters
>are in the color that the default background used to be, and the background is
>white, but only where there are letters. It makes Emacs look like
>a serial killer cut and pasted all the text onto the screen.

I'm a Windows user so I can't give you very detailed help but I do
know that this problem happens to emacs users with KDE quite
frequently.  First, I'd suggest you try starting emacs with the "-q"
option which will by-pass the emacs configuration files so that
whatever you can see when emacs has started is what KDE has done to
you: it's possible that what you're seeing is a horrible mix of some
relatively sensible KDE settings and the settings from your ~/.emacs
(etc) file.

Next, assuming you're starting emacs from a menu, try checking to see
if KDE has added parameters to the command used to start emacs.  It
may say something like ".../emacs -fg coral -bg 'slate blue' -r" where
"-fg" sets the foreground, "-bg" sets the background and "-r" sets
reverse video.

Finally, you'll have a file called .Xresources (probably in ~/ but,
being a Windows user, I'm not sure about that).  This may contain
settings that are affecting the appearance of emacs -- I think the
settings will look something like "emacs*geometry: xxxx" but, again,
I'm not sure.  Also, I believe that emacs inherits some of the
.Xresources settings for "xterm", so you probably need to check those
as well.

HTH.

-- 
MMM