[OS X Emacs] Re: aquamacs 1.9 configuration issues

[David Reitter]

Kurt,

On Mar 16, 2010, at 10:01 PM, Kurt Andrews wrote:


> 	• get everything that i open or create with aquamacs to use the same "menlo" font

My take on this is that you have to disable Aquamacs' Auto Faces (in the Options menu) and then select a different font.

> 		• This is where the questions start I worked on this for two days and I'm still not sure it's the right way to do this, but it's working for me.  I won't add any of this information to the wiki until someone can explain what's going on and whether or not this is the right way to do this.
> 		• Following the instructions on the aquamacs wiki to change the default font, added line 18 to my customizations.el, 

Manipulating customizations.el is not recommended.  This file is re-written every time you exit Aquamacs (or Save Options).  It is not a user-level file.  Please edit Preferences.el instead.

> but that didn't change the font to menlo for everything.  I tried options->appearance and setting the font for individual modes.  Saving options after each change for a mode, made the font persist for that mode, but I didn't want to have to do that for every mode.  I don't even know how many there are or exactly what a mode is.  Options->appearance->autofaces->use current face as default added line 19 to customizations.el.  This did the trick for me, now everything uses the same font,

Yes, that is the way the user interface is intended to be used.

> but color-theme-selector is broken.  I don't even know what faces/autofaces are so I'm not sure what's going on 

Make a bug report about what is "broken".

> 	• Get a better color theme working (maybe fix xcode or create my own)
> 		• Since I was never able to get the xcode color theme to stick, the default color theme is working for now, but I find it hard to read especially the way perl mode is highlighting hashes and arrays, I've got to fix that.

Aquamacs 2.x has a nice way of letting you drag&drop colors out of the color panel (Options/Appearance menu) onto the syntactically isolated parts that you want to change.

>  There may be a bug in the xcode color theme, (Warning: Bug in color-theme-mode: it forgets to call `run-mode-hooks) is logged to the messages buffer when I try to use it.  I don't know if this is why it won't stick or not. 

This is only relevant when Auto Faces are on.  But is is a bug in color-theme-mode.  And it won't cause the problem you're describing.

I don't think we have a provision to save the color theme (theoretically the faces it defines should be saved with Save Options).

You can try adding it to the mode hook:

(add-hook 'cperl-mode-hook 'color-theme-tiger-xcode)

... for example.
Try it out with C-x C-e or M-:, then put it in your Preferences.el (~/.emacs works, too).


> I'd like to try to fix this or come up with my own color theme but I don't really understand the process for changing any of the el code in the gzip files, our how to create the compiled elc code that's in the resource directory.

Never change the files, but you can copy stuff out of there into your Preferences.el.
You may (require  ...) the file, then add your own code to override.  
Byte-compiling to .elc is optional.

Google should know more about how to add your own color theme.
I would agree that color themes are limited in their documentation.  That's why we haven't exposed the UI for it in Aquamacs 2.x.  Changing faces in Aquamacs 2.x directly (with the color panel) might be the cleaner solution. 

Hope that helps.

- David


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