Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 25, 2014, 15:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20140425151124.GA11479@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpqfvl1rj7i.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

Hi,

Matthieu Moy wrote:

> I am personally in favor of changing the default to drop the S. Silently
> hiding stuff from the user's eyes is really bad. With good coding
> standard and reasonable terminal size, it actually doesn't matter.

Just for clarity: no, when we are talking about well formatted code, -S is actually a way better interface.

That's because indentation matters and makes it easy to take in code structure at a glance, long lines that get cut off by the margin stick out like a sore thumb already, and lines wrapped at an arbitrary character are even more distracting to the point of being useless.

In practice I believe the "Silently hiding stuff" concern is much harder to solve. In the case of malicious code that opened this thread, I think a marker on the right margin would reveal the whitespace more clearly than wrapping that the reader may or may not notice.

Luckily, it is very easy to switch between the two views on the fly --- in an already-open "less" window, you just type '-' + 'S'. In the spirit of not overriding tool defaults when there is not a strong reason to do so, I agree that if someone writes a patch to drop the 'S' I would probably like it.

[...]

> I do not think we particularly need a transition plan here: it's purely
> a user-interface thing, not something that may break any script or other
> tool.

Agreed ---- a note in release notes and making sure the documentation reflects the new default should be enough.

Thanks and hope that helps, Jonathan