Re: [PATCH] help: colorize man pages

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: May 18, 2021, 23:49 UTC
Message-ID: <YKRSlFcFAcHcR3uY@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <60a332fd22dad_14c8d4208ed@natae.notmuch>

On 2021-05-18 at 03:22:37, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> brian m. carlson wrote:
> > I think we should let the user decide whether they want to set this
> > feature themselves instead of setting it for them.  For example, I have
> > specific colors set up with these environment variables, and I'd like
> > Git to honor them without having to configure Git independently of less.
> > I expect other users will expect Git's rendering of the manual pages to
> > work like other instances of man(1) on their system as well.
> 
> It does respect them.
> 
> This would render the man page with the color specified in the
> environment, not the default of git.
> 
>   LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[1;33m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[m' git help git

It still doesn't work like other instances of man(1) on the system. While you claimed that "that's a preference others don't share", I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only person who feels this way.

There's a big difference between Git coloring a Git UI, like a diff, and Git coloring a separate program that already has sensible, standard defaults. A user who has not configured any color settings would probably not want Git to render manual pages one way, cargo to render manual pages a second way, and still other programs to render manual pages in other, incompatible ways. We need to consider not only the impact that our decisions have in a vacuum, but what results similar decisions from other projects would produce in the software ecosystem as a whole.

Would you consider various projects coloring their respective manual pages differently to be a desirable state of affairs?

Show 5 quoted lines

> > Additionally, using colors poses accessibility problems.  I know someone
> > who, due to his colorblindness, finds terminal colors distracting and
> > hard to read, and prefers not to use them at all.
> 
>   git -c color.ui=never help git

Yes, but unfortunately, since you've colored the manual pages, they may be hard to read for the user who needs to read them to learn about your configuration. This is great for you and me, who are already very familiar with Git and know how to do that without looking, but not great for the novice colorblind user.

For similar reasons, colorizing help output in general is unhelpful because users cannot find the options to disable it.

In general, this is made worse because Git doesn't honor the unofficial but widely supported NO_COLOR[0], so reading the documentation is obligatory.

Show 6 quoted lines

> > Even users who want to use them might find some colors to be too
> > similar, and this patch doesn't permit them to be configured.
> 
> Yes it does:
> 
>   LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[01;38;5;33m' git help git

I should clarify that the patch doesn't permit them to be configured using the normal Git mechanisms. For example, unless the user sets the environment variables, which take effect globally, they're stuck with the colors that we've chosen here. Yes, they can specify a single environment variable before the command, but practically nobody will do that.

It's my argument that the user doesn't want Git manual pages to be colored differently than other manual pages on the system, but if you believe differently, then we should allow the user to configure the colors that are used in the Git-specific context using Git standard mechanisms.

Show 7 quoted lines

> > In my particular case, despite having normal color vision, because I use
> > a transparent terminal which often results in a grey background, I find
> > the standard terminal red to be difficult to read, and so this patch
> > would result in a significant decrease in the readability of the manual
> > pages for me.
> 
> If you have LESS_TERMCAP_md set in your environment, it won't.

The problem is, I don't always. I am on call for a set of hundreds of servers, only one of which has my shell configuration set up, so defaults here matter. Moreover, because there are many novice users of Git, we should consider that for a decent number of users, they literally won't know where to look in our documentation to make changes, and therefore the defaults matter for them, too.

[0] https://no-color.org/

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