bbatsov/zenburn-emacs — Issue #18: How to further customize?
Author: dabrahams
Created: 2011-10-19 22:00:51+00:00
State: open

This may really be an Emacs theming question, but I haven't got much useful help from the emacs lists.

I'm using the zenburn customization theme (as opposed to color-theme.el), but I want all my mail citation faces to inherit from this:

```cl
;; I like citations in email to be set off from the rest of the text
;; by a slightly different background color. This helps immeasurably
;; when people forget to leave a blank line after citations. see
;; gnus-settings.el and wl-settings.el, where I inherit this face.
(defface dwa/mail-citation '((((class color)
(background dark))
(:background "#383838"))
(((class color)
(background light))
(:background "#efefef")))
"Mail citation base face.")
```

I *was* doing something like this in my .emacs:

```cl
(loop for x in gnus-cite-face-list do
(set-face-attribute x nil ':inherit 'dwa/mail-citation))
```

but that seems to prevent zenburn customizations from "showing through." I could make my own theme that includes these changes *and* all of zenburn's customizations to these faces, but that seems clumsy at best.

I need to switch back and forth between zenburn and a lighter theme on a fairly regular basis. What is the elegant way to handle situations like this one?