Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Apr 25, 2014, 15:32 UTC
Message-ID: <8761lxa0gs.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <20140425151124.GA11479@google.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 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.

When we are talking about well-formatted code, -S does not matter either which way.

> 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.

Lines which are cut off are not "to the point of being useless", they _are_ useless.

I am not arguing that wrapped lines are pretty. And I also consider the "malicious" or "hiding" angle at best a marginal concern.

Overriding less' defaults should only be done for unequivocal benefits, and in this case I consider the result actually more of a detriment than anything else.

-- 
David Kastrup