Need a helpful hint in XEmacs

[Bill Case]

I am using Xemacs v 21.4 on RH 9. Up until now everything has been Ok. I have been able to customize keys etc both through the menus and directly in the init.el file (custom.el). But now I have two questions.

1) How can I customize the background of the face just in sh-mode. I would like to have a different background colour when writing shell scripts. I can get everything I want in default, but my understanding of using hooks or whatever has broken down completely. I would like to be able to make the changes using the Customize menus but I will take any advice I can get. There is someting in my understanding that is missing and its getting fustrating.

2) I have googled etc. everywhere to try and find a forum or an advice site to solve this and there seems to be only a very few xemacs sites that are appropriate. Does any one know of a good xemacs (or emacs) web site? The xemacs.org location seems to be dealing only with questions regarding beta versions and not the kind of problems I am having.

Thanks Bill

[GaryJones32]

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp-manual/

that's going to be tough
try reading "face.el"
background and cursor color are user defined and
go into the frame from DOMAIN variables
every user sets it up differently
and then the frame inherits the users colors
so it's not really set up for a mode to control it.

you could always just

emacs -bg white somescript.sh

you can controll the highlighting font face colors if you need to instead