Most users seem to like having colors enabled, and colors can help beginners to understand the output of some commands (e.g. notice immediately the boundary between commits in the output of "git log"). Many tutorials tell the users to set color.ui=auto as a very first step. These tutorials would benefit from skiping this step and starting the real Git manipualtions earlier. Other beginners do not know about color.ui=auto, and may not discover it by themselves, hence live with black&white outputs while they may have prefered colors. A few people (e.g. color-blind) prefer having no colors, but they can easily set color.ui=never for this (and googling "disable colors in git" already tells them how to do so). A transition period with Git emitting a warning when color.ui is unset would be possible, but the discomfort of having the warning seems superior to the benefit: users may be surprised by the change, but not harmed by it. The default value is changed, and the documentation is reworded to mention "color.ui=false" first, since the primary use of color.ui after this change is to disable colors, not to enable it. Signed-off-by: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@xxxxxxx> --- > > I'd love to see this by default, yes. Maybe a 2.0 change? > > > > If people agree that this is a good change, would we need a transition > > plan? I'd say no, as there is no real backward incompatibility involved. > > People who dislike colors can already set color.ui=false, and seeing > > colors can hardly harm them, just temporarily reduce the comfort for > > them. > > I vote for this. It's the first thing I do in any setup, even the ones > that are note mine. I've also seen it in basically all the tutorials, > even before setting user.name/email. > > I also don't see the point of a transition plan. OK, then let's try turning the discussion into code. I'm starting to wonder why we didn't do this earlier ;-). Documentation/config.txt | 11 ++++++----- color.c | 2 +- 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt index 1009bfc..97550be 100644 --- a/Documentation/config.txt +++ b/Documentation/config.txt @@ -913,11 +913,12 @@ color.ui:: as `color.diff` and `color.grep` that control the use of color per command family. Its scope will expand as more commands learn configuration to set a default for the `--color` option. Set it - to `always` if you want all output not intended for machine - consumption to use color, to `true` or `auto` if you want such - output to use color when written to the terminal, or to `false` or - `never` if you prefer Git commands not to use color unless enabled - explicitly with some other configuration or the `--color` option. + to `false` or `never` if you prefer Git commands not to use + color unless enabled explicitly with some other configuration + or the `--color` option. Set it to `always` if you want all + output not intended for machine consumption to use color, to + `true` or `auto` (this is the default since Git 2.0) if you + want such output to use color when written to the terminal. column.ui:: Specify whether supported commands should output in columns. diff --git a/color.c b/color.c index e8e2681..f672885 100644 --- a/color.c +++ b/color.c @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ #include "cache.h" #include "color.h" -static int git_use_color_default = 0; +static int git_use_color_default = GIT_COLOR_AUTO; int color_stdout_is_tty = -1; /* -- 1.8.3.rc1.313.geb32591.dirty -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html