Emacs on Windows 7: How to get color theme »solarized-light« working? - emacs

I'm using Emacs 24 on Windows 7. I installed the solarized theme, see here: https://github.com/sellout/emacs-color-theme-solarized
It is easy to switch to the color-theme, e.g. by doing M-x load-theme and then pick solarized-light.
But especially the colors of solarized-light are nearly unreadable. The colors are not even close to the colors of the pictures. I guess there is something wrong with a thing called »color palette«, see here: console2 colors solarized
Any ideas?
Edit: I made a screenshot of Emacs which shows the pretty low contrast.

So, I installed it now, and I see the lack of contrast. But the difference seems to be cause by the difference in font rendering across operating systems.
The screenshots on the github page have most likely been done on Mac OS, which renders the fonts the thickest. The theme looks reasonable on Linux with the default font, although, depending on the settings, it renders the text a bit or more thinner. And Windows renders text with the smallest amount of "ink", so to speak. While it's considered sharper my some users, it also makes things worse when a theme uses low-contrast colors, such as the light version of Solarized.
Another thing to note is that the screenshots are done in Vim, which has a different syntax highlighting mechanism from Emacs, so the colors on keywords, etc, are bound to be different.
But I took two screenshots, on Ubuntu and Windows, opened them in Gimp, zoomed in, used the color picker, and the value of the blue color was approximately the same as on the reference screenshot: 2690db.

In my view, i don't feel the theme work improperly.
The following is my screenshot, os x, Emacs 24.3
Have you tried to change another font or theme (if that is not your only love)

Related

Syntax highlighting colors have suddenly lowered in contrast (VSCode)

My syntax highlighting colors suddenly look like this:
It looks as if the contrast or brightness has been lowered, or that it has been grayed out.
I can still use everything normally.
My colors used to look like this:
My setup:
VSCode 1.75.1
Ubuntu 22.04 (Gnome)
One Dark Pro theme (but I have it with every theme)
Every file gives the same issue, including files in Home directory (to make sure it's not write permissions)
Does anybody know what could be causing and how I could fix this?
I fixed it. I used to have the Adobe "Source Code Variable" configured as a custom font on Windows, and synced my settings to Ubuntu.
I didn't have the font installed but installed it a bit ago.
After changing to another font it is normal again. Seems like this specific font makes it look low in contrast.
Setting variable: editor.fontFamily

DBeaver Content Assist colors

I am having difficulty getting the Content assist colors right. With auto-completion, the first suggestion is always light color on light color. Here is what it looked like originally (Dracula Theme):
Changing the values of Content Assist Background/Foreground colors did not have any affect on the top suggestion. Here is a screenshot from after swapping the Content Assist Foreground and Background colors (Darkest Dark theme):
I have tried swapping every other practical color setting in Window->Preferences->General->Appearance->Colors and Fonts with no luck. The color scheme in the first image above is the popular Dracula theme that I manually set up setting by setting. Thinking I screwed something up in there, I scrapped all that work and switched to the Eclipse DevStyle theme Darkest Dark. Here, I was met with the same issue. After this, I switched everything to default settings where the color scheme is black font on white background. Everything is readable. Switching back to the Darkest Dark, the issue remains.
I have found similar questions regarding this, but their solutions are mostly for Linux (GTK specifically). This machine I am using is on Windows 7. I also have a laptop that runs DBeaver on Arch Linux and does not suffer from this problem. It seems this issue may be system dependent. I found one answer that suggested changing the message box settings for Windows may fix this, but my message box settings are currently black text on white background. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Most of the SWT widgets relay on the OS level theme. For example, it's known that using the Windows Classic theme at the OS level can cause oddities like this one. So just switching to a different theme can fix this issue.
maybe you have found the solution, just in case anyone is still searching...
we can change the color of "content assist", you can find in "Colors and fonts".
click here to see the setting

Make emacs gui use only terminal colours

Since xterm supports only 16 colours, when you run emacs inside xterm, it automatically maps the myriad colours defined by the various syntax colouring modes to one of the 16 terminal colours. That's the behaviour I want to have on the emacs gui.
Is there a way to make the emacs gui believe that only the 16 terminal colours are available?
Also, can I disable mouse support in the emacs gui? What I want is the gui to behave exactly like emacs inside xterm.
Thank you in advance!
(If you wonder why I want this: After nearly 15 years running emacs inside xterm, I'm sure that's what suits me best.
However, my new employer is forcing me to work on a Windows workstation and now I'm compelled to use the native emacs gui because I haven't managed to get ecb to run with cygwin's emacs. I've already spent a lot of time trying to get the emacs gui to behave like emacs inside xterm, but I still have too many colours.)
Your best chance may be to just use a color theme that just uses 16 colors for all faces. The Solarized theme for example uses just about 16 colors even in a GUI Emacs. It still makes use of bold and italic fonts, though, and occasionally (and very rarely) uses some lighter color variants to emphasize text, which might already be too much for you.
You could also compile your personal set of 16 colours, and customize the faces of your Emacs to use only these colors.

What are some good emacs font faces to manually set?

There is alllll kinds of information out there about emacs color schemes, font locks, etc but I am having trouble getting where I want to be. Basically I would like to know what are some of the best font faces to set in order to have a nice solid color theme which is a good cross language solution. I am ending up with lots of language syntax (parens, brackets, operators, etc) not highlighted in some places when I expect them to be.
Below are the faces I am currently setting:
font-lock-builtin-face
font-lock-comment-face
font-lock-comment-delimiter-face
font-lock-doc-face
font-lock-doc-string-face
font-lock-function-name
font-lock-keyword-face
font-lock-negation-char-face
font-lock-preprocessor-face
font-lock-string-face
font-lock-type-face
font-lock-variable-name-face
What if any major faces am I missing here?
Don't do it like this. Choose a colour-theme that looks "okay" and when you're doing some work and find something unsatisfactory, customise that face to suite your taste.
I once knew someone who actually did an xlsfonts and opened an xterm for each one to decide which one he wanted to use while coding. Not thing kind of way I'd like to spend my time. :)
zenburn is a beautiful color theme. I use the terminus font on debian.
anyhow, I give up trying to use best font in GUI system. I revert to Raster Font, use in DOS Prompt / if it is in Linux, a TTY. Now that is so simple :)
My main workstation is Windows. There is (off course) native Win32 GUI version of Emacs, but I prefer to run it in DOS Command Prompt, using I am using emacs -nw. Using a few trick (write app that draw black border around screen edges), a found it able to make an illusion that it is in a console mode.
I love console mode :)

Setting a dark color theme in Eclipse makes the function tooltips unreadable

I've found that setting a dark color theme in Eclipse makes the function tooltips unreadable.
This is probably easiest to describe with a picture:
alt text http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9503/blahi.gif
Any ideas how to fix this?
The best solution i've found is to leave eclipse in normal bright mode, and use an OS level screen inverter.
On OSX you can do command-shift-8 (i think that's the key combo), inverts the whole screen
on linux with compiz, it's even better, you can do windows-n to darken windows selectively. (or windows-m to do the whole screen)
on windows, the only decent solution i've found is powerstrip, but it's only free for one year.. then it's like $30 or something..
then you can invert the screen, adjust the syntax-level colours to your liking, and you're off to the races, with cool shades on.
If you are running Eclipse in Ubuntu or other environment where it uses GTK+ themes, you can follow this guide to edit the tooltip and autocomplete colours from outside Eclipse. Not the ideal solution, but it does the trick.