Re: Man pages have colors? A deep dive into groff

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: May 18, 2021, 01:28 UTC
Message-ID: <YKMYUUVVVJMWH7xi@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <87tun1qp91.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On 2021-05-17 at 16:48:04, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> This looks much better.
> 
> I wonder a good follow-up (hint, hint! :) would be to have
> exec_man_man() and exec_man_cmd() in builtin/help.c set this depending
> on color.ui (so we'd do it by default with "auto").
> 
> Then e.g. "git help git" would look prettier than "man git".

As I mentioned on the patch itself, I'd prefer if Git didn't do this. I have my own colors configured and don't want Git to render its man output differently from what I have. Even if I didn't, I wouldn't want Git to change the output of man(1) to be different from what's on the system.

I should point out that I have my shell configuration set up to use different colors depending on the capability of the terminal, such as using a 256-color palette when that's supported and a 16-color palette when it's not, so there is literally no configuration that Git can provide here that matches my existing settings.

Additionally, colors tend to pose accessibility problems for a lot of people. I have normal color vision, but because I use a transparent background which renders as grey, the standard terminal red is nearly illegible for me. I also know people with colorblindness who have problems with various colors or any colors at all.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US