Re: [PATCH v4] help: colorize man pages

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Phillip Wood [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On 20/05/2021 05:07, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

We already colorize tools traditionally not colorized by default, like
diff and grep. Let's do the same for man.

I think there is a distinction between 'diff' and 'grep' where we are
generating the content and help where we are running man - I would 
expect a man page to look the same whether it is displayed by 'man git
foo' or 'git help foo'

... as long as the user chooses "man" backend, that is.  And I tend
to agree, but that is our expectation.

If we added this new mode of driving the same "man" but with
different environment variables exported to tweak how "less"
behaves, and taught it to builtin/help.c::exec_viewer() and
builtin/help.c::man_viewer_list, that might become more palatable in
the sense that we can view it as feeding the same manual page to
this another "man" that behaves differently from the plain "man",
just like we can feed it to "woman" or "konqueror" to get a different
view.  So those (like you and I) who expect a man page to look the
same in "man git foo" and "git help -m foo" can keep using our current
configuration, while those who want yet another variant of "man" output
in addition to the current "man", "woman", and "konqueror" can choose
it and get "colorized" output.

So... "mancolor"?

By the way, this new round mentions NO_COLOR, and while I think it
is good idea to teach git to honor it, I think it does it at a wrong
level.

Other people have already mentioend the FAQ [1]:

  It is reasonable to configure certain software such as a text editor
  to use color or other ANSI attributes sparingly (such as the reverse
  attribute for a status bar) while still desiring that other software
  not add color unless configured to.

At whatever level it's chosen it shouldn't blatantly disable all color.

Each ui driver that is optionally capable of coloring its
output shouldn't have to care,

But they do have to care. The purpose of NO_COLOR is not to disable all
color, but to disable annoying color.

https://no-color.org/

-- 
Felipe Contreras