From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
To: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>,
Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org, "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>,
"Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>,
"Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] help: colorize man pages
Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 05:25:29 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <60a4e799ce22e_86a8208b7@natae.notmuch> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YKRSlFcFAcHcR3uY@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
brian m. carlson wrote:
> On 2021-05-18 at 03:22:37, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> > brian m. carlson wrote:
> > > I think we should let the user decide whether they want to set this
> > > feature themselves instead of setting it for them. For example, I have
> > > specific colors set up with these environment variables, and I'd like
> > > Git to honor them without having to configure Git independently of less.
> > > I expect other users will expect Git's rendering of the manual pages to
> > > work like other instances of man(1) on their system as well.
> >
> > It does respect them.
> >
> > This would render the man page with the color specified in the
> > environment, not the default of git.
> >
> > LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[1;33m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[m' git help git
>
> It still doesn't work like other instances of man(1) on the system.
> While you claimed that "that's a preference others don't share", I'm
> pretty certain that I'm not the only person who feels this way.
Two people feeling in a certain way is not an argument against a feature
that could potentially benefit millions of people.
> There's a big difference between Git coloring a Git UI, like a diff, and
> Git coloring a separate program that already has sensible, standard
> defaults.
Would you be happier if I implement an entirely new library to render
asciidoc documentation in a pretty way and make `git help` link to that?
That way we wouldn't be using "a separate program".
> A user who has not configured any color settings would
> probably not want Git to render manual pages one way, cargo to render
> manual pages a second way, and still other programs to render manual
> pages in other, incompatible ways.
That is one opinion. Again, not shared by everyone.
> Would you consider various projects coloring their respective manual
> pages differently to be a desirable state of affairs?
That is irrelevant, because we are not talking about `man git`, we are
talking about `git help git`, which can render help in a variety of
ways.
You can do for example `git -c man.viewer=woman help git`, and the
result would be *completely* different from what the user sees in `man
git`.
A different thing is different.
Would you be happier if we enable this with `man.viewer=mancolor`?
> > > Additionally, using colors poses accessibility problems. I know someone
> > > who, due to his colorblindness, finds terminal colors distracting and
> > > hard to read, and prefers not to use them at all.
> >
> > git -c color.ui=never help git
>
> Yes, but unfortunately, since you've colored the manual pages, they may
> be hard to read for the user who needs to read them to learn about your
> configuration.
man git
> > > Even users who want to use them might find some colors to be too
> > > similar, and this patch doesn't permit them to be configured.
> >
> > Yes it does:
> >
> > LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[01;38;5;33m' git help git
>
> I should clarify that the patch doesn't permit them to be configured
> using the normal Git mechanisms. For example, unless the user sets the
> environment variables, which take effect globally, they're stuck with
> the colors that we've chosen here. Yes, they can specify a single
> environment variable before the command, but practically nobody will do
> that.
If you don't like the colors they can disable them.
They lose absolutely nothing from the state of git 2.31.
> It's my argument that the user doesn't want Git manual pages to be
> colored differently than other manual pages on the system,
/usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz is not changed.
> > > In my particular case, despite having normal color vision, because I use
> > > a transparent terminal which often results in a grey background, I find
> > > the standard terminal red to be difficult to read, and so this patch
> > > would result in a significant decrease in the readability of the manual
> > > pages for me.
> >
> > If you have LESS_TERMCAP_md set in your environment, it won't.
>
> The problem is, I don't always. I am on call for a set of hundreds of
> servers, only one of which has my shell configuration set up, so
> defaults here matter.
Surely you can live typing `man $x` instead of `git help $x` for a bit.
> Moreover, because there are many novice users of
> Git, we should consider that for a decent number of users, they
> literally won't know where to look in our documentation to make
> changes, and therefore the defaults matter for them, too.
And we are considering them.
But the defaults are for the majority.
--
Felipe Contreras
prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-05-19 10:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-05-18 1:01 [PATCH] help: colorize man pages Felipe Contreras
2021-05-18 1:19 ` brian m. carlson
2021-05-18 3:22 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-18 23:49 ` brian m. carlson
2021-05-19 1:08 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-19 2:07 ` brian m. carlson
2021-05-19 6:09 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-19 8:41 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-05-19 10:36 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-21 0:58 ` brian m. carlson
2021-05-21 18:09 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-21 19:48 ` Igor Djordjevic
2021-05-21 21:20 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-21 22:10 ` Igor Djordjevic
2021-05-21 23:04 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-22 18:38 ` Igor Djordjevic
2021-05-22 21:48 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-23 11:25 ` Igor Djordjevic
2021-05-23 14:48 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-21 22:47 ` Igor Djordjevic
2021-05-21 23:32 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-19 9:26 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-05-19 10:10 ` Jeff King
2021-05-19 11:45 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-19 11:19 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-19 12:21 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-20 1:55 ` brian m. carlson
2021-05-20 2:23 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-20 3:05 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-20 3:28 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-20 3:48 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-20 2:45 ` Felipe Contreras
2021-05-19 10:25 ` Felipe Contreras [this message]
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