Re: [PATCH v4] help: colorize man pages

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 21, 2021, 18:01 UTC
Message-ID: <60a7f57fe3301_5503920831@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <YKdy5jhHgG2who27@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 02:06:48PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> > Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> > > On 20/05/2021 05:07, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> > >> We already colorize tools traditionally not colorized by default, like
> > >> diff and grep. Let's do the same for man.
> > >
> > > I think there is a distinction between 'diff' and 'grep' where we are
> > > generating the content and help where we are running man - I would 
> > > expect a man page to look the same whether it is displayed by 'man git
> > > foo' or 'git help foo'
> > 
> > ... as long as the user chooses "man" backend, that is.  And I tend
> > to agree, but that is our expectation.
> > 
> > If we added this new mode of driving the same "man" but with
> > different environment variables exported to tweak how "less"
> > behaves, and taught it to builtin/help.c::exec_viewer() and
> > builtin/help.c::man_viewer_list, that might become more palatable in
> > the sense that we can view it as feeding the same manual page to
> > this another "man" that behaves differently from the plain "man",
> > just like we can feed it to "woman" or "konqueror" to get a different
> > view.  So those (like you and I) who expect a man page to look the
> > same in "man git foo" and "git help -m foo" can keep using our current
> > configuration, while those who want yet another variant of "man" output
> > in addition to the current "man", "woman", and "konqueror" can choose
> > it and get "colorized" output.
> 
> I still don't understand what we gain by making this a Git feature,

What do we gain by making `git diff` output color?

> Why would we do that versus saying: if you want to change the colors in
> the tool that Git calls, then configure the tool?

Once again... How?

> If you like to see colors in manpages, why not configure "man" (either
> by setting these environment variables all the time, or by triggering
> them in MANPAGER)?

Let me try that...

  MANPAGER="less -Dd+r -Du+b -Ds+m" git help git

It doesn't work.

> If those configurations are awkward to trigger via man (e.g., putting
> escapes into termcap variables), isn't that something that could be
> improved in man? And then it would benefit everyone who uses man, not
> just Git.

Sure. In the meantime let's make `git help` output with color just like `git diff`.

Cheers.

(and good luck convincing a GNU project of anything)

-- 
Felipe Contreras