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Re: [Nmh-workers] colorized/highlighted scan output?

2012-11-02 23:39:10
So what do others think?

That this functionality in a command line tool is silly.  If you need a
GUI, install exmh.

Well, I respectfully disagree.  If we replace "cyan" with "bold"
or "underline", we're talking about functionality that has been
used with VT100-compatible terminals for a long time.  Okay, how
that actually ends up happening has always been a bit weird; for
example, man outputs "bold" text by doing overstriking with ^H and
less knows how to deal; I don't know if that was planned as much
as it is an artifact of history.  But I don't see any logical
difference between hilighting the current message with bold or
inverse versus using cyan.  Now maybe it's just me, but I'm personally
not a fan of colorized ls; the default color scheme chosen has poor
contrast in my experience, and it ends up messing up the terminal
in a number of situations.  But I'd be happy with something that
could do bold or underline.

Oliver Kiddle writes:
Multiplying maximum width by MB_CUR_MAX is one way to determine a
suitable buffer size though that doesn't allow for escape seqences for
colours. Is it too ugly to have the function allocate the buffer and
rely on the caller to free it?

Memory management in the format code is terrible; I struggled with that
a lot when adding support for replyfilter.  Having fmt_scan() allocate the
buffer would make a lot more sense.  Cleaning that up was actually one of
my medium-term projects.

Kevin Costgrove writes:
How do 'grep' and 'ls' do their color highlighting?  That seems 
pretty portable across the systems I use.  Maybe there's something to 
borrow from those?

I just looked; ls, at least, hardcodes the ANSI sequence strings
into the code (hm, so does grep).  I don't know if that's standard
practice or not; somehow doing that still sticks in my craw.  I will
note that scan and inc already link against termcap.

--Ken

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