brian m. carlson wrote: > On 2021-05-18 at 03:22:37, Felipe Contreras wrote: > > 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. Two people feeling in a certain way is not an argument against a feature that could potentially benefit millions of people. > 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. Would you be happier if I implement an entirely new library to render asciidoc documentation in a pretty way and make `git help` link to that? That way we wouldn't be using "a separate program". > 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. That is one opinion. Again, not shared by everyone. > Would you consider various projects coloring their respective manual > pages differently to be a desirable state of affairs? That is irrelevant, because we are not talking about `man git`, we are talking about `git help git`, which can render help in a variety of ways. You can do for example `git -c man.viewer=woman help git`, and the result would be *completely* different from what the user sees in `man git`. A different thing is different. Would you be happier if we enable this with `man.viewer=mancolor`? > > > 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. man git > > > 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. If you don't like the colors they can disable them. They lose absolutely nothing from the state of git 2.31. > It's my argument that the user doesn't want Git manual pages to be > colored differently than other manual pages on the system, /usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz is not changed. > > > 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. Surely you can live typing `man $x` instead of `git help $x` for a bit. > 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. And we are considering them. But the defaults are for the majority. -- Felipe Contreras
