automatic selection of colors

[mtk]

i use darkslategrey as my background color and green as my foreground color (with a yellow cursor). the colors chosen automatically by highlight-indent-guides for any of the display modes are essentially invisible. i'm guessing the strategy of making the guides darker than the background doesn't work when the background is already very dark?

i tried to configure things by hand and found it somewhat confusing.

1. after making a change in the customization window, i was surprised that when i switched back to a buffer using the indent guides, it wasn't changed. i had to restart in order to see the change. i'm using emacs with LSP/metals for scala and have 335 libraries loaded (native comp makes it easy to quantify this if you run the 'pmap' command against a live emacs process :-)), so restarts are painfully slow. is there a reason the change isn't immediate?

2. i assumed that if i changed any of the manual settings, auto-enabled would be automatically set to 'off'. that caught me a few times. once i figured this out, it made me wonder what happens to the auto settings (essentially default settings) when it is 'off'? are they still computed/used? the whole 'auto enabled' strategy i found confusing. it makes sense to provide default values for settings. not sure why it is useful to enable/disable this?

3. i found the naming of settings to be confusing. or maybe the grouping of them in a customization window? i'm lazy and i don't want to read a lot to figure out if there are different settings for 'character' or 'bitmap'. in the brief time i spent playing with a manual config, i was able to change the colors for 'character' but not for 'bitmap'. and my choices for 'character' where not aesthetically pleasing ("i'm a programmer, jim! not a graphic artist!" :-).

any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated.

[mtk]

ah, now it is failing as i move to different levels of indentation with:

Error running timer ‘highlight-indent-guides--try-update-line-cache’: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)

[mtk]

these are the h-i-g settings from my custom.el that are triggering the error reported above:

-'(highlight-indent-guides-auto-enabled nil)
'(highlight-indent-guides-method 'bitmap)
'(highlight-indent-guides-responsive 'stack)
'(highlight-indent-guides-character-face ((t (:foreground "light green"))))
'(highlight-indent-guides-stack-character-face ((t (:foreground "light green"))))
'(highlight-indent-guides-stack-even-face ((t (:foreground "pale goldenrod"))))
'(highlight-indent-guides-stack-odd-face ((t (:foreground "light blue"))))

[Dickby]

Hi @mtk,
it would be nice if you could try the commit in the pull-request that i did.
It is possible that it fixes your problem.
Thanks

[Dickby]

If you replace all load-theme with enable-theme.
You don't have to restart emacs to see the configuration changes.
I hope this package is still maintained.

[scalac-mtk]

just saw these responses today! will try soon. thanks!

[Dickby]

the load-themereplacement is already part of the pr.
so no need to do any extra work