Using Emacs in fbterm.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Emacs.

I think it's time to begin a new thread on fbterm, which isn't about
undisplayable characters any more.

Just as a matter of interest, I've amended my copy of the fbterm's
source code so as to remove most of the "stolen" key combinations,
leaving just S-<prior> and S-<next> in place.  These scroll the screen
vertically, allowing one to view previous messages or commands.

fbterm is hosted at GitHub, where there seem to be 28 forks of it, most
of them, probably, being very slight differences from their forkees (is
that a word?).  So much for free software.  ;-)

In the GNU/Linux distribution I use, Gentoo, the version of fbterm is
one of those forks.  One change in it, made 7 years ago, was changing
the setting of the environment variable TERM from "linux" to "fbterm".
It seems that this will vary randomly between these forks, and also
randomly between G/L distributions.  There might be something in the
terminfo setup to enable one to distinguish fbterm from the Linux
console when TERM is "linux".

There is a problem with colours in Emacs in fbterm.  When one does M-:
(defined-colors) it prints a list of just eight colours, black, red,
...., white.

However, the face constructing mechanism seems to assume more than eight
colours, and this seems buggy.  The face hi-green, for example, rather
than having background "green" gets "light green".  This appears on the
terminal as dark yellow, which is clearly wrong.

Also the face mode-line-inactive is indistinguishable from the default
face, so when there're more than one window in the frame, they are less
easy to distinguish than they should be.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).