Re: facemenu-unlisted-faces

[Chong Yidong]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> "Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> If you want to have simple faces in the Faces menu, then limit the
>> choices to Bold, Italic, and Underline, as well as perhaps a few
>> simple color swatches for quickly changing foreground color (forget
>> about dired-this and *-that). That's what most WYSIWYG menus
>> provide. The number of such "faces" is usually less than 20, and the
>> menu item for a color is a swatch, not its name ("Red") - the "menu"
>> appears more as a rudimentary palette than a list of names. A
>> simple, quick menu for bold, italic, underline, and a few simple
>> foreground colors would be useful.

This idea is more relevant for the "Foreground Color" and "Background
Color" submenus of "Text Properties", which currently are populated
only by the entry "Other" (which prompts you to enter a color name).

> One problem with mere swatches is that a non-trivial part of the male
> population (typical programmer's sex) is color-blind in some respect.
> If those swatches are used for more than coloring the person's
> personal screen (namely if colors may persist), then picking colors
> judiciously necessitates seeing their names for such people.

The standard way that graphical programs get round this is to add a
little colored box next to the color name.  However, I don't know of a
simple way to do this valid for all the toolkits Emacs runs on
(e.g. text properties don't show up in GTK menus.)  Probably someone
can look into this after the release.