Sunday, June 21, 2009

Emacs: P1: What Color Is My Painbow?

Last week I had a classic "Monkey Boy" moment. I decided to adjust the colors in my text editor. 10 days later I'm finishing a 3 post blog on it.

I worry myself some days.

This first post is going to be mostly theory work. Post 2 and 3 are more hands on.

Laying the Ground Work.

I use an editor called Emacs for most of my programming. It's an old editor, but its one of the most powerful editors out there. It also lets you edit files in display (windows) mode and from the shell (command.com for you Windows folks).

Now days most of the editing is done in display mode. No real surprise there. However, there are times when working from the shell makes more sense.

I routinely log into distant machines across slow connections. I could pop up a virtual session and wait for the window in the virtual session and then wait for the editor in the window in the virtual session and then wait for the file in the editor in the window in the virtual session, or I can use text mode, where are complete screen refresh is around 2000 bytes.

I hate waiting. Its a no brainer.

The down side of terminal mode is that you can only use characters to draw and you have a limited number of colors. Both of these could be overcome with modern technology, but it ain't going to happen so we have to get used to it.

Why do you have limited colors? Well, the underling technology differences between a terminal from 20 years ago and a modern graphic display is pretty significant.

RGB

Colors are made by mixing various amounts of Red, Green and Blue (RGB) together. If you crank up the RGB, you get bright colors, dial it down and you get dark. Wikipedia has a nice write up on color depth so I won't go into it here. The only thing you need to know is that by adjusting the RGB values you can change colors.

On modern display you have absolute control of every dot on the screen. Each one has it's own RGB setting which is independent of it's neighbor.

Old school color terminals were more like "paint by numbers" projects. You were given a pallet of colors (usually 8) that were hard wired into slots. If you set the color to pallet slot 0 and then printed, you got black text. If you printed in color 4 you might get blue. Unfortunately for us, these are the terminals that most terminal emulators emulate.

We have two problems when we want use Emacs in both terminal and display mode: First is that Emacs's support of terminal colors is functional, but not much more. The second is that the friendly Emacs customizers don't like it when you're a switch hitter. In fact they gets down right medieval on your monkey butt. Well, this ain't monkey butt, this is monkey boy butt. Accept no substitutions.

Terminal Colors


As I said before, most terminal emulators model the old style, 8 color pallets. There are ways for a program to ask the emulator for the number of colors available, but there isn't any way to get the actual RGB of each color.

What does Emacs do? It guesses! If you don't tell it otherwise Emacs assumes that you have an 8 color pallet with the following colors:


Slot Name Red Green Blue
---- ------- --- ----- ----
0 black 0 0 0
1 red 255 0 0
2 green 0 255 0
3 yellow 255 255 0
4 blue 0 0 255
5 magenta 255 0 255
6 cyan 0 255 255
7 white 255 255 255


The numbers after the colors are how much Red Green and Blue that each color is supposed to have. 255 is the largest number you can express in 8 bits (1 byte) of data. There are places internally where Emacs uses 16 bit (2 byte) RGB values which go from 0 to 65535. I got bit by this more than a few times so I'll try to point them out, or gloss over them when I can.

Emacs cares about the RGB values because you (the user) set colors by name not slot values. If you set the color of something to "CadetBlue1" 152/245/255, then run in terminal mode, Emacs needs to figure out which of the eight colors CadetBlue1 is closest to. It uses the RGB values to figure it out.

Oh, by the way, the name "CadetBlue1" comes from a variable called "color-name-rgb-alist". To see it's contents, fire up Emacs in display mode and type "M-x list-colors-display". You'll see the colors and their names.

Let's do some hands on. From a terminal, type "emacs -nw". It should start an Emacs session in the terminal. In Emacs type "M-x list-colors-display". You'll get a listing of the 8 colors that Emacs knows about. Note: On some systems you get more than eight. Lucky you. The theory is still the same.

If you're like me, you notice one thing first off. These colors look nothing like their names! The Red might be brick colored. Yellow may look brown. And my white has tattle tale gray! What happened?

Easy. Emacs has no idea what colors your terminal's pallet is set to and it's guess stinks. How do we handle the miss-match?

One option is to change our terminal to Emacs's pallet. Then we can vomit and claw our eyes out. Basic colors tend to be rather harsh on the psyche.

The second option is to tell Emacs what our terminal is really packing. That's the subject of the next post.

2 comments:

Mr. Perkins said...

Obiligatory "vi" reference here. No comparisons or snarky remarks included, it just seems that no Emacs or vi article is complete until someone mentions the other.

Dale Wiles said...

Some day, in the far future, the last post will be made in the VI vs Emacs wars.

But not in my life time.

I actually use VIm all the time. The only major bitch I have about it is that they made such a hack out of the scripting language.