Background highlight (selection) colors

[joonro]

For both the light and dark themes, background highlight colors are from the opposite theme. They are not easy on the eyes IMO. As in the Solarized site (http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized, very bottom), it should be base2 for the light theme and base02 for the dark.

[purcell]

Really? I'm pretty sure it's already correct, and double-checking the code doesn't reveal any obvious problem. Plus, using an on-screen colour meter shows the same colours in my Emacs as on the Solarized page.

[purcell]

Perhaps you could attach a screen shot?

[purcell]

Oh, and also: which platform are you on, what version is your Emacs, and have you set color-theme-sanityinc-solarized-rgb-is-srgb to t?

[joonro]

I'm using GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.2.9200). I installed this theme through package-list-packages.

Here is the screenshot:

As you can see, the highlighting color are from solarized light.

[purcell]

Aha, thanks, I see what you mean. It would be possible to change the foreground colour of the selected area, but this would prevent any other colours from showing up in the selected region, ie. anything which was colourised red or blue in the selected region would instead be displayed as grey. This is also not ideal.

So I think that the current situation is the best compromise, and the authors of the other Emacs solarized themes seem to have made the same choice, e.g.: https://github.com/bbatsov/solarized-emacs/blob/master/solarized.el#L357

[joonro]

Actually what I'm talking about is the background (not the foreground) of the selected area - it should be base02, a bit lighter color than base03, not yellowish base2. (as described in the http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized.) I'm sorry if my explanation is not clear.

[joonro]

I just made the change an made a pull request #11. It looks like it might conflict with secondary-selection so I don't think it is ready to be merged - I just wanted to make it clear what I was talking about. Thanks!

[purcell]

Yes, I'd like to reserve the alt-background colour because it's very widely used (and useful). Please try the following, which is what one of the other solarized themes used, and let what you think:

(region (:foreground ,strong :inverse-video t))
(secondary-selection (:background ,alt-background))

As you can see, the trade-off is that the colouring of the region is lost, but maybe that's preferable to the glaring light background.

[joonro]

Thanks a lot. I tried what you suggested, and while I prefer it to the light region highlighting, it is hard to read. I wonder if it is possible to use unused base00 for the region.

[purcell]

Ah, but that colour is used, for comments, so comments would disappear when the region is highlighted.

I’ll have to think about the best way to proceed in the long term, but I may go ahead and change to the solution above for now.

Thanks for your help and patience!

-Steve

[joonro]

Shouldn't comments be base01, not base00 though? Thanks for quick reply!

[purcell]

Yes, probably. I was using base00 for the comment delimiters and base01 for the comment text, which provided a little contrast between the two. But now I've updated it to use base01 for both.

[joonro]

Thanks!