This is a short note explaining how to use JED with a color terminal.  This
only applies to Unix and VMS spplies to Unix and VMS systems.  This is
particularly relevant if you want to exploit JED's ability to do color
syntax highlighting on a character based terminal.

  *Note: If you use MS-Kermit as a terminal emulator, you will need
	 to tell it what foreground/background colors you want via
	 the `set term color' function.  For example, if you choose
	 back on white as the `normal' color, put `set term color
	 30 47' in your MSKermit.ini file.  This same comment
	 applies to other color terminals which emulate this flawed
	 color model.

To use JED with a color terminal, it is necessary that the terminal
understand ANSI color escape sequences.  If so, then it is possble to set
up JED to use different foreground and background colors for the modeline,
region highlighting, syntax highlighting, etc...

To turn on ANSI color support, set the variable `USE_ANSI_COLORS' to a
non-zero value.  If set to zero, the support is turned off. The colors may
be specified using the set_color function as illustrated in jed.rc.  They
only become active if USE_ANSI_COLORS is non-zero.

Unfortunately, few termcaps provide information regarding whether the
terminal is a color one or not. To interactively set USE_ANSI_COLORS, simply
press `Ctrl-X ESC' and enter

     USE_ANSI_COLORS = 1
     
at the `S-Lang>' prompt.  

This variable is automatically set to a non-zero value by jed if
environment variable COLORTERM exists.

Finally, you could simply put:

  define term_use_colors () { USE_ANSI_COLORS = 1; }
  
in your jed.rc (.jedrc) and define (alias) jed to be:

  alias colorjed 'jed -f term_use_colors'