Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Sascha Wilde]

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On 2005/04/17 the font-lock-keywords in mail/rmail.el and
mail/sendmail.el were changed, so that teh text of citations is no
longer fontified (only the leading mark, normally "> " is...).

Why was that change made?  I found it much easier to distinguish cites
and different levels of citations when the whole cited text were
fontified.

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde
    "Liebet eure Feinde, vielleicht schadet das ihrem Ruf" 
    (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)

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Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

    mail/sendmail.el were changed, so that teh text of citations is no
    longer fontified (only the leading mark, normally "> " is...).

    Why was that change made?

Because I found the cited text hard to read with that font.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Sascha Wilde]

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On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 05:06:36PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     mail/sendmail.el were changed, so that teh text of citations is no
>     longer fontified (only the leading mark, normally "> " is...).
> 
>     Why was that change made?
> 
> Because I found the cited text hard to read with that font.

In that case, wouldn't it be sufficient to change the default font
used for cited text?

The face used is font-lock-comment-face so it's used for important
Text all the time and should be well readable anyway...

cheers
sascha
-- 
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web 
page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had 
very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another 
word processor, or another network." -- Tim Berners-Lee, July 1996

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Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

    In that case, wouldn't it be sufficient to change the default font
    used for cited text?

There may not be many choices on a text console.  Anyway, I don't
see any reason why cited text should be fontified.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Sascha Wilde]

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On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 12:13:54PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     In that case, wouldn't it be sufficient to change the default font
>     used for cited text?
> 
> There may not be many choices on a text console. 

This is a general problem of font-lock-mode on a text console.  

As I wrote in my mail: the face used is the same as used for comments,
so it really has to be readable, as it is used for long and important
text in many situations.  If that seems not possible, than using
fontification in general is the problem, not only for sited text in
mails.

> Anyway, I don't see any reason why cited text should be fontified.

Well, for the same reason fontification is used most of the time:
it's easier to distinguish cited text from the rest of the buffer
content, even without looking at the beginning of the lines.

cheers
sascha
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Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:13:54 -0400
> 
> Anyway, I don't see any reason why cited text should be fontified.

IMHO, the reason is, if nothing else, that this is how Mail mode
behaved on a tty since v21.1, and users did not complain too loudly
(or we would have changed that).  I really don't think we should
disable that fontification now just because you happen to dislike it.
Perhaps all you need to do is play a bit with your colors.

Failing that, here's a suggestion for a more complicated solution:
define special faces for Mail mode, so that they could be customized
without affecting general-purpose faces such as comment face.  Then
people who don't like fontified citations could disable that, but
still have comments in program sources fontified as before.
(Personally, I think that using a face meant for comments in a mail
buffer is very far-fetched.)

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Miles Bader]

On 4/20/05, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> There may not be many choices on a text console.  Anyway, I don't
> see any reason why cited text should be fontified.

I find it helps a lot to focus my eye when writing a mail-message with
lots of cited text; it makes it much easier to see the interleaved
citation/reply structure at a glance.

I agree that the default face sucks though (I have that face customized).

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Kim F. Storm]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
>> 
>> Anyway, I don't see any reason why cited text should be fontified.
>

It makes a lot of sense to me.  It just makes it so much easier to
write longer responses (which I know RMS doesn't do very often :-)

Now, I use message-mode rather than mail-mode, so as long as the
change is specific to mail-mode, I don't care too much.

>                                   I really don't think we should
> disable that fontification now just because you happen to dislike it.

Agree!

> Failing that, here's a suggestion for a more complicated solution:
> define special faces for Mail mode, so that they could be customized
> without affecting general-purpose faces such as comment face.

Message mode already has numerous faces to play with...

I fail to see the rationale for extending mail-mode, when we
already have another mode that DTRT...

Why don't we simply promote message-mode, and deprecate mail-mode.

Would (defalias 'mail-mode 'message-mode) work?

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

    IMHO, the reason is, if nothing else, that this is how Mail mode
    behaved on a tty since v21.1, and users did not complain too loudly
    (or we would have changed that).

Maybe hardly anyone used font lock on Rmail buffers in text consoles.

I don't know how to try changing this, because I can't even tell
which clause in the defface is used.  How would I find that out?

(defface font-lock-comment-face
  '((((class grayscale) (background light))
     (:foreground "DimGray" :weight bold :slant italic))
    (((class grayscale) (background dark))
     (:foreground "LightGray" :weight bold :slant italic))
    (((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light))
     (:foreground "Firebrick"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark))
     (:foreground "chocolate1"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 16) (background light))
     (:foreground "red"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 16) (background dark))
     (:foreground "red1"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background light))
     (:foreground "red"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background dark))
     (:foreground "red1"))
    (t (:weight bold :slant italic)))

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

    it's easier to distinguish cited text from the rest of the buffer
    content, even without looking at the beginning of the lines.

I find it easy to distinguish with the citation markers fontified.
They are bright red and very visible.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 10:57:25 -0400
> 
> Maybe hardly anyone used font lock on Rmail buffers in text consoles.

I doubt that this is the case.  (I certainly used Rmail on text
consoles many times, but that's just me.)

> I don't know how to try changing this, because I can't even tell
> which clause in the defface is used.  How would I find that out?

I'm guessing that you use a standard terminal that supports 8 colors.
If so, look here:

>     (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background light))
>      (:foreground "red"))
>     (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background dark))
>      (:foreground "red1"))

Depending on your background mode, one of these 2 clauses is yours.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)
> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 10:04:58 +0200
> 
> > Failing that, here's a suggestion for a more complicated solution:
> > define special faces for Mail mode, so that they could be customized
> > without affecting general-purpose faces such as comment face.
> 
> Message mode already has numerous faces to play with...
> 
> I fail to see the rationale for extending mail-mode, when we
> already have another mode that DTRT...

The rationale is that I don't think we should deprecate modes that
still work well and are maintained.

> Would (defalias 'mail-mode 'message-mode) work?

I don't know, but I'm quite sure now is not the time for such
changes.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Sascha Wilde]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 10:57:25AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     IMHO, the reason is, if nothing else, that this is how Mail mode
>     behaved on a tty since v21.1, and users did not complain too loudly
>     (or we would have changed that).
> 
> Maybe hardly anyone used font lock on Rmail buffers in text consoles.

I'm not using Rmail, but mail-mode from sendmail.el with font lock on
a text console on a daily basis.  And I liked the old behavior better
-- but I guess you know that by now.  ;-)

Maybe introducing special faces for fontification in mail-mode, like
Eli suggested, would be the right thing to do, so anyone could
customize them without affecting fontification in other modes.

An other possibility might be to introduce a way to customize whether
to fontify the whole cited text or only the markers...

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde
    "Computers are good at following instructions,
     but not at reading your mind."
    D. E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison-Wesley 1984, 1986, 1996, p. 9

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

Nobody ever asked me about installing message-mode.  It was installed
as "part of Gnus".  I think the Gnus developers should have talked
with me before planning to implement another mode for composing mail.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Nobody ever asked me about installing message-mode.  It was
> installed as "part of Gnus".  I think the Gnus developers should
> have talked with me before planning to implement another mode for
> composing mail.

Gnus handles quite a lot of functionality with regard to message
encoding and decoding when viewing messages as well as composing.
Given that it handles mail and news in a unified way when reading, it
would not make sense to do this differently when writing (and indeed
you can send the same posting as News and Email).

It is also quite closely intertwined with the Gnus system, such as
being able to archive copies of posts in certain Gnus groups.

Since it is closely coupled with the Gnus system of groups and
functions, I don't consider it feasible to either get along without
message-mode at all, nor make it the default even for people not using
Gnus.

Personally, I use nothing else.  But since it really is a part of Gnus
also functionally, I don't think it is a one-size-fits-all kind of
solution.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> It is also quite closely intertwined with the Gnus system, such as
> being able to archive copies of posts in certain Gnus groups.

The original intention was very clearly to replace mail-mode and to not be
specific to Gnus.  But since noone else picked it up, it has of course been
difficult to make sure it's really cleanly modularized.

I believe it is desirable to get rid of mail-mode and replace it with
message.el, but I expect it will take some work, and now is not the time.


        Stefan

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Richard Stallman]

    I'm guessing that you use a standard terminal that supports 8 colors.
    If so, look here:

    >     (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background light))
    >      (:foreground "red"))

With just 8 colors, I doubt there is a better alternative.
What are the standard 8 colors?

I dislike red for real comments, too; it is too hard to read.
On the other hand, I am not sure I would want to turn off
fontification entirely for comments, even on these terminals.
Turning it off for cited text in Mail and Rmail is a much
smaller change with less downside, since the citation markers
are still fontified.

Perhaps we should have one face for comment delimiters and
another for comment text.  Then the comment delimiter
face could be red on these terminals, while the comment text
font could be default on these terminals.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[David Hansen]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 11:31:07 -0400 Richard Stallman wrote:

>     I'm guessing that you use a standard terminal that supports 8 colors.
>     If so, look here:
>
>     >     (((class color) (min-colors 8) (background light))
>     >      (:foreground "red"))
>
> With just 8 colors, I doubt there is a better alternative.
> What are the standard 8 colors?

black red green yellow blue magenta cyan white

> I dislike red for real comments, too; it is too hard to read.

Note that you can set the XResources XTerm*color0 to
XTerm*color15 (8-15 are the bold versions).  And the Linux
console seems to have far more eye friendly colors than the
default xterm colors.

David

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 11:31:07 -0400
> 
> Turning it off for cited text in Mail and Rmail is a much
> smaller change with less downside, since the citation markers
> are still fontified.

I'm sure this will annoy many of those who read mail on color-capable
text terminals.

I suggested to introduce Mail-specific faces to allow them to be
independently customized.  This way, people who are annoyed by this
change in behavior, can get the old one.

Re: Fontification of citations in mail-Mode

[Sascha Wilde]

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On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 11:31:07AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Perhaps we should have one face for comment delimiters and
> another for comment text.  Then the comment delimiter
> face could be red on these terminals, while the comment text
> font could be default on these terminals.

I think this would be a very good solution.  This way any desired
behavior can be easily achieved by simple customization.

thanks
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde
Well, *my* brain likes to think it's vastly more powerful than any
finite Turing machine but it hasn't proven that to me...
  -- Christopher Koppler in comp.lang.lisp


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