Re: [PATCH] help: colorize man pages

From

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>

Date

May 20, 2021, 02:45 UTC

Message-ID

<60a5cd3ed5aaf_1e275208a0@natae.notmuch>

In-Reply-To

<YKXBdQ36MYz2YG8s@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

brian m. carlson wrote:

> On 2021-05-19 at 09:26:12, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, May 18 2021, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > 
> > > Would you consider various projects coloring their respective manual
> > > pages differently to be a desirable state of affairs?
> > 
> > I think it's an important distinction that we're not coloring any manual
> > pages, it's a question of whether we invoke "man" invoked by "git help
> > <whatever>" with the exact same paramaters/options a user would get with
> > "man git-<whatever>".
> 
> Yes.  I would expect that if the man option is chosen, then we invoke
> man without modification.

Do you also expect git to call diff without options?

> The documentation says, "use the man program as usual".  "As usual"
> implies the way the user would invoke it.

The documentation can be updated.

> > I don't think it's confusing in that context if we learn to do some "man
> > with fancy on top" in this mode.

> It's pretty obvious that "git help commit" and "cargo help build" both
> are intended to invoke man when used in the normal way.

And I don't.

I expect the output `foo help $x` to be decided by foo.

If I do `python help len` and I get an error, that's fine.

> > But if colors only add, but don't substract information by default
> > that's not an issue for the color blind, correct? Or at least that's
> > been my understanding in helping color blind user in the past (and not
> > being color blind myself).
> 
> The problem becomes if the color is indistinguishable from other
> elements.

> It is _also_ a problem if we have two colors with sufficient contrast
> between the foreground and background but those colors look the same and
> there is no other distinguishing factor.

There is another distinguising factor: they are *bold*, or _underlined_.

> So, yes, if the colors only add information and they can otherwise be
> distinguished, then it's fine.

We are setting *bold*, _underlined_, and REVERSE.

Exactly in the same way as they are set already.

A truly colorblind person would see no difference at all.

> What I don't like is when a program colors text in a certain way, I
> can't read it, and then I can't read the help output or documentation to
> turn it off.

> I am specifically arguing against coloring our documentation

We already already coloring our documentation.

> and help output because it leaves users with little recourse to fix
> the problem.

man git.

-- 
Felipe Contreras