Re: [RFC/PATCH] builtin/blame: darken redundant line information

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Jun 14, 2017, 00:33 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kaCGJicxhwwKC3QCSDWg_8U8X=3mPZT672fUje7f-tKKA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20170613164256.1773a62d@twelve2.svl.corp.google.com>

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 4:42 PM, Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Mon, 12 Jun 2017 19:31:51 -0700
> Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:
>
>> When using git-blame lots of lines contain redundant information, for
>> example in hunks that consist of multiple lines, the metadata (commit name,
>> author, timezone) are repeated. A reader may not be interested in those,
>> so darken them. The darkening is not just based on hunk, but actually
>> takes the previous lines content for that field to compare to.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
>> ---
>>
>>  Example output (blame of blame): http://i.imgur.com/0Y12p2f.png
>
> Looking at this image, how does blame decide what to dim? As it is, I see many
> identical timestamps (and also from the same commit) not being dimmed.
> (For example, see the very last line with "2013-01-05 ..." which is
> identical to the previous line, and I would expect that to be dimmed.)

The date dimming is broken (it is implemented separately as a hack :/)

> Also, my preference is to have all-or-nothing dimming (dim the whole
> line up to and including the time zone if nothing has changed, and dim
> nothing otherwise) but I know that this is a subjective issue.

ok, noted.

That is what I had as a very first design (except for dimming, blanking out the lines with white spaces) and then went on "dimming even more".

I think this is also very similar to the discussion of boundary colors of the moved blocks in the neighboring thread, this is finding "blocks" (actually the finding part is easy as we are given the blocks) and then applying some "dim middle, highlight boundaries" algorithm, which in this particular case is a "highlight first line, dim the rest" for each field separately.

Originally I dreamed more a Zebra-style non-boundary coloring, the colors being temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature) and the recency dictating the temperature, such that you can easily see which code is "hot" (i.e. modified recently)

Going by that I we could have different definitions of hotness:
* recency
* number of patches on a given line though that is hard to estimate
  when a line was changed vs newly-introduced
* number of different authors in a given function (= block of text with
  the same context hint in a virtual hunk header)