There are two ways to open Emacs in the terminal. emacsclient -nw (connects to an existing daemon) and emacs -nw (creates a new instance of Emacs in the terminal). The background of the daemon terminal frame will be different – sometimes an ugly shade of your chosen theme’s highlight.
(left: emacsclient -nw, right: emacs -nw)
This occurs because the solaire-mode plugin tries to use a slightly off-background color for your real, file-visiting buffers, but while this looks great in GUI Emacs…
It doesn’t in the terminal because terminals only support 256 colors (by default). There, a subtle shade is difficult to achieve, so Emacs approximates, and often does so poorly.
Doom disables solaire-mode when you start tty Emacs (emacs -nw), but cannot do this for daemon users; it cannot guess what kind of frame you’re will open, so it’s leave to users to disable it themselves.
Two reasons:
Users can open graphical or terminal frames from a daemon session. It is impossible to guess which the user will use, primarily. Doom assumes GUI frames and leaves solaire-mode on (leaving it to uses to disable it otherwise).
There is no such thing as frame-local themes or face customizations in Emacs, so solaire-mode cannot apply itself on a per-frame basis.
The
:ui doommodule does try to guess, but it appears to only work for some and not others, and will affect all open frames, graphical or otherwise.
There are two:
solaire-mode. If you intend to use Emacs primarily in the terminal.
(package! solaire-mode :disable t) to ~/.doom.d/packages.el
doom sync
COLORTERM=truecolor to your environmental variables (shell, systemd service, etc.).In addition to the workarounds above, the following snippet will make Emacs’ background “transparent”, therefore matching your terminal:
;; add to ~/.doom.d/config.el
(custom-set-faces!
'(default :background nil))