Colors

The default emacs frame or window might be good enough for some, but if you get tired of black on white or simply prefer another layout like yellow on blue (like the good old Wordperfect for DOS days), or white on grey if you're working at night in low light conditions might give your eyes a rest. And the relentless desktop themers who need everything on their desktop to match color schemes can have some fun with this as well. Set the foreground color and background colors with M-x set-background-color and M-x set-foreground-color, respectively. As you press return, a buffer window will open up requesting you input the color you like. If you're working in X (as opposed to at a console) you have dozens of colors at your disposal. Start typing 'bl' for blue and then press tab and note how many blues are available. Same goes for most colors. For that matter, you can choose the cursor color and mouse color in the same way, namely M-x set-cursor-color and M-x set-mouse-color.

If you decide to make these your defaults, it's a matter of adding something like the following to your .emacs preferences file:

(set-foreground-color "white")
(set-cursor-color "red")
(set-mouse-color "goldenrod")
(set-background-color "black")