Re: [PATCH v4] help: colorize man pages

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 01:01:35PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

I still don't understand what we gain by making this a Git feature,

What do we gain by making `git diff` output color?

Huh? Git is outputting the diff. Who else would output the color?

quoted

Why would we do that versus saying: if you want to change the colors in
the tool that Git calls, then configure the tool?

Once again... How?

By exporting the environment variables that ask it to do so, just like
you showed already?

quoted

If you like to see colors in manpages, why not configure "man" (either
by setting these environment variables all the time, or by triggering
them in MANPAGER)?

Let me try that...

  MANPAGER="less -Dd+r -Du+b -Ds+m" git help git

It doesn't work.

  ESC=$(printf '\33')
  export MANCOLORS="LESS_TERMCAP_md=$ESC[31m LESS_TERMCAP_me=$ESC[0m"
  export MANPAGER='sh -c "eval $MANCOLORS less"'
  man ls
  git help git

At least on Linux, $MANPAGER is some weird limbo that is not run with
the shell, but not just a simple command. Hence the extra layer of "sh".

If I were actually planning to use this myself, I'd probably put it in a
"manpager" script in my $PATH and just do MANPAGER=manpager.

-Peff