Re: [PATCH 4/5] grep: Colorize filename, line number, and separator

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Michael Witten [off-list ref] wrote:

Of course, I bet you find colorizing the filenames a nuisance because
you don't care to pipe the relevant escape sequences to other
commands.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but my reason has nothing to do
with piping.  If the output is entirely in a single color, I would
prefer that color to be my terminal's default.  The color adds no
value.

On that note, it would be nice to have something like GNU's
--color=(auto|yes|no) with `auto' as the default for a plain --color.

Something like [1]?  By the way, the default should be 'always', not
'auto', to be consistent with GNU tools, and to be backwards
compatible with the old --color behavior.

[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/139864

As a compromise (and perhaps as an improvement), perhaps only the
basename of the filename should be colorized when --name-only is used;
that way, colorization is still being used to differentiate different
data, and the rest of the path is usually not that interesting anyway.
However, for consistency, I would still think it wise to colorize the
dirname portion with `color.grep.filename', but color the basename
portion with `color.grep.match' (as though the basename portion is the
text being matched).

Personally, I am not a fan of this, but if it is implemented, it
should be an option, and should be turned off by default.  Instead of
highlighting the name, it may be better to simply highlight the
slashes so the reader can more easily parse the path.  But still, I
don't think this is worth the trouble.