Emac in Terminal opens in unusable green background

Question

[OS X 10.11, MacPorts Emacs 24.5, OS X Terminal, lots of stuff in emacs and shell init files]

I almost always use Emacs.app (GUI). Sometimes I want to open Emacs in a terminal. When I open Emacs from a terminal I get a bright green background that in combination with my usual theme is unusable -- I can't even read the messages at the bottom of the window.

I have tried this with various Terminal Profiles but they all do the same. I have tried emacs -bg while but that doesn't work either.

How do I control the background color of Emacs opened from the terminal?

Answer 1

Few themes work well with emacs run within a terminal because you are dealing with a much smaller color palette. Unless you have enabled 256 colors in your terminal, you are likely working with just 8 colors when you fire up emacs in a terminal. An easy way around this issue is to conditionally load your color theme selections only when you are working with the gui version of emacs. The window-system variable contains the info you want, however use of that variable in situations such as this is deprecated in favor of the function display-graphic-p.

In your .emacs file try guarding your color theme initialization using something like the following:

(when (display-graphic-p)
  ; color theme initialization code goes here
  )

display-graphic-p returns non-nil if the current display is a graphic display, and it returns nil if it is a terminal. See the docs if you are interested: C-h f display-graphic-p. For more info on window-system variable: C-h v window-system.

Doing this will cause the default color theme to be loaded when you start Emacs in a terminal. While not very pretty, it works with 8 and 256 colors.

Answer 2

Something like this in your ~/.emacs will leave the terminal foreground and background untouched, i. e. emacs will use your terminal colors:

(custom-set-faces
 ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.                                   
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.            
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.                   
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.                       
 '(default ((((type tty))))))

This basically says that when the display type is tty, don't set attributes on the default face.

You can use this more generally to pick different attributes for X11 vs. terminal:

(custom-set-faces
 ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.                                                                                                                                                                 
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.                                                                                                                                          
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.                                                                                                                                                 
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.                                                                                                                                                     
 '(default ((((type tty)))
             (t (:background "#6F4700" :foreground "yellow" :slant normal
                 :weight normal :width normal :height 140 :foundry "default"
                 :family "monospace"))))
 '(font-lock-comment-face ((((type tty)) (:foreground "brightgreen"))
                            (t (:foreground "green1")))))