Greetings - If I do the following in my .emacs: (set-face-foreground 'default "LightYellow") (set-face-background 'default "Black") The custom-properties of the current frame do not change: (frame-property (selected-frame) 'custom-properties) ==> (type x class color background light) even though the 'background property should be 'dark after the set-face-background call. The fact that the background is mis-identified as 'light, confuses font-lock and hyper-apropos (and probably other libraries) into using the wrong foreground color for fonts. For instance, font-lock-comment-face (in the current frame) has a color of blue4 instead of gray80. Here is the definition of font-lock-comment-face from font-lock.el: (defface font-lock-comment-face '((((class color) (background dark)) (:foreground "gray80")) ;; blue4 is hardly different from black on windows. (((class color) (background light) (type mswindows)) (:foreground "blue")) (((class color) (background light)) (:foreground "blue4")) (((class grayscale) (background light)) (:foreground "DimGray" :bold t :italic t)) (((class grayscale) (background dark)) (:foreground "LightGray" :bold t :italic t)) (t (:bold t))) "Font Lock mode face used to highlight comments." :group 'font-lock-faces) You can see that it's matching the (background light) specifier instead of (background dark). Subsequent frames get the right interpretation of background color: (make-frame) (frame-property (selected-frame) 'custom-properties) ==> (type x class color background dark) Does anyone know where the calculation is done that deduces whether the frame's background is light or dark? It seems the (set-face-background 'default ....) should call that code. BTW, here's how I'm working around this particular problem: ;; Set faces and colors (and (equal (emacs-type) "xemacs") (set-face-font 'default "-*-dejavu sans mono-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-m-*-iso8859-1") (set-face-foreground 'default "LightYellow") (set-face-background 'default "Black")) ;; Workaround #4 (setq initial-frame-plist '(custom-properties (class color background dark))) (frame-notice-user-settings) I never used to have this problem because I used X resources to set the foreground and background color and that caused the custom-properties to get set correctly prior to the instantiation of the first frame. Thanks, Vin _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta