Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jun 2017, #03; Mon, 5)

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:

> The color experts agreed that (3) might be the best solution
> as this gives most flexibility:
>
>     "I would be happy as I can configure the bounds highlighting
>     to not exist, it would degenerate to a pure Zebra, which is
>     very simple to understand. Junio seemed to like (2) a lot, so
>     he would configure both dim colors to be 'context', but configure
>     the highlight colors to be attention drawing. So everybody would
>     be happy. It is also not too many colors, we are good at for loops."

Another thing I found a bit confusing in the description of choices
in the documentation was that description for some began with "Based
on X.", and as a plain reader, I couldn't tell if that is saying
"the implementation happens to be similar or shares code with X"
(which is not all that interesting to the end user) or "the meaning
this mode tries to convey is the same as X but the presentation is a
bit different" (in which case the end user is hinted that it is
benefitial to understand what informacion the mode X shows and how).

For example, I view what I prefer (i.e. (2)) as a variant of Zebra
(i.e. (1)).  Conceptually, you paint the diff output using water
soluble paint into a Zebra pattern, then apply thin strips of
protective tape to places where two Zebra colors are adjacent to
each other (i.e. do not cover the boundary between a block of a
Zebra colored moved lines and a block of context lines), dunk the
whole thing in water and then remove the strips of tape.  Regions
covered by the strips of tape will retain the Zebra colors, while
the remainder of the Zebra colored part are colored in a much subdued
way.  Understanding how Zebra mode marks the moved lines would help
understanding its output, but your implementation may not share much
code with the actual implementation of Zebra-painting.

Thanks.