Re: [PATCH] help: colorize man pages

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1786 bytes --]

On 2021-05-18 at 01:01:21, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> Our man pages don't contain many useful colors (just blue links),
> moreover, many people have groff SGR disabled, so they don't see any
> colors with man pages.
> 
> We can set LESS_TERMCAP variables to render bold and underlined text
> with colors in the pager; a common trick[1].
> 
> Bold is rendered as red, underlined as blue, and standout (messages and
> highlighted search) as inverse magenta.
> 
> This only works when the pager is less, and the color.pager
> configuration is enabled, as well as color.ui.

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.

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.  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.

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.

So overall I think I'd prefer if we didn't color manual pages for the
user.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 262 bytes --]