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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 18, 2021, 02:12 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqeee44wp4.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <YKMYUUVVVJMWH7xi@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

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> 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.

git -c color.man=false help -m" would let you consume the output in any way you want, I would presume?

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> 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.

Yes, accessibility issues are real. But a bit of configuration to disable colors would rescue our users. I work on white-background with black pixels, and colored diff output that shows lost lines on the same background with red pixels is hard to read for me, but thanks to color.diff.<slot> settings, I can customize it to draw in reverse colors.