[ESS] Color in terminal?

[Stephen Eglen]

 > I guess this is more eclectic question and I might be asking too much but 
 > might be relevant for those who use Terminals e.g. Secure CRT to connect 
 > to UNIX servers (Solaris) to run Statistics programs.
 > 
 > While I see quite nice colors using ESS on Gnome terminal (X11 on Linux) 
 > but I dont see any colors at all in the terminal (say if I am using 'emacs 
 > -nw' in Linux terminal) or using secure CRT. Indeed the default pattern in 
 > which the comments are highlighted seems much better in this case because 
 > everything becomes quite similar to everything else in ESS mode .
 > 
 > I think the whole range of palette of colors is probably not supported but 
 > atleast 4 colors (RGBY) are in my terminal. I checked using M-x 
 > edit-faces. I am wondering if there is some setting (faces) that might be 
 > useful for such terminals.
 > 
 > I am attaching my custom.el (which is my initialization file) inline for 
 > your perusal.

When you run Emacs in a terminal, do you get any sensible font locking
e.g. of C files?  If not, it may be an issue more general than ESS.
if you do, what do you see?

e.g. try the following snippet of C code.

  mm = 4 * n;			/* Number of repeats */
  mm *= 10;			/* if starting from Poisson distribution. */
  for (i=0; i<= mm; i++) {
    id = (int)(n*UNIF);	/* pick one point at random. */
    /*Rprintf("select new point for unit %d\n", id);*/
    xpts[id] = xpts[0]; ypts[id] = ypts[0];


For what its worth, I see different font locking in an X11 Emacs
window compared to when I view the same code within a Gnome Terminal.
(e.g. on the above code, although "/*" and "*/" are highlighted in
red, the text "Number of repeats" is not highlighted in red.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, or intentional... 

Stephen