Default syntax highlighting as in "emacs -Q"

Question

I want to use the syntax highlighting that you get when running emacs -Q. If I run emacs -q, or run Emacs with no ~/.emacs file existent, or not load any custom theme, I get a dark-backgrounded color theme. I also tried altering my init file, but to no avail. Disabling a custom theme also leads to the dark theme aforementioned.

How can I get the font-lock colors default in emacs -Q?

Answer 1

C-hig (emacs)Initial Options tells us:

‘-Q’
‘--quick’
     Start emacs with minimum customizations.  This is similar to using
     ‘-q’, ‘--no-site-file’, ‘--no-site-lisp’, and ‘--no-splash’
     together.  This also stops Emacs from processing X resources by
     setting ‘inhibit-x-resources’ to ‘t’ (*note Resources::).

Hence the difference you're seeing between using -q and -Q is going to be on account of one (or more) of:

• --no-site-file
• --no-site-lisp
• setting inhibit-x-resources to t

You can check the first two by running: emacs -q --no-site-file --no-site-lisp

‘--no-site-file’
     Do not load ‘site-start.el’ (*note Init File::).  The ‘-Q’ option
     does this too, but other options like ‘-q’ do not.

‘--no-site-lisp’
     Do not include the ‘site-lisp’ directories in ‘load-path’ (*note
     Init File::).  The ‘-Q’ option does this too.

I would be more suspicious of the X resources, though. If it's that, you may just be able to add (setq inhibit-x-resources t) in your init file, but my tests for that were not successful, so YMMV.

See also:

• C-hig (emacs)Resources
• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ResourceFiles