Re: new *Help* argument highlighting

[Juanma Barranquero <lektu@mi.madritel.es>]

On 09 May 2004 20:00:07 -0400, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> I just find it odd to highlight arguments more than, say, the function's
> name (i.e. basically the title of the help buffer).

I've read that already on the thread, and I find it very surprising.
When I read a describe-function *Help* buffer, I'm never interested in
the function's name: I already know that, I *typed* it. In 100% of cases,
the reason I type C-h f is precisely to find what to pass to the args.
In a great many cases, I'm interested in just a few args, because the
others I remember from previous uses of the function, so having a way to
quickly determine where on the docstring are these args referred seems a
big win, performance-wise. I think other people must be using C-h f in
very different ways to mine...

> Maybe italics will make it less strange, but the current bold I see is just
> very surprising because it highlights (in the literal sense) parts of the
> docstring as if they were THE-THING-I-VE-BEEN-LOOKING-FOR, even when it
> has strictly no indication that it's what I'm interested in.

Bold, or italics, just reinforce the convention already stated by using
uppercase, I think.

> I didn't say fruit salad.  I meant a sober presentation like you'd find in
> a book (e.g. generated from Texinfo).

Yeah, sorry, I didn't intend to imply that. But I get the feeling (I can
be wrong) that there are people who simply likes the Help buffers with
no highlighting/font-locking at all. That's also a bit surprising to me,
given that we use font-locking in a lot of cases, like the recently
added `completions-fist-difference' and `completions-common-part' faces.
It's not like help-argument-name introduces highlighting on an otherwise
very sober Emacs environment... :)

> No colors, please.

No, not as default. I don't think anyone would like that.

                                                           /L/e/k/t/u