Re: Reopen bug 535: Problem with highlit regions on Linux virtual terminal

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> Yes, it is high-contrast and so on, in the same way that a foghorn at
> 200m is highly audible when you're trying to have a quiet conversation.

This a silly analogy, and bears no resemblance to the actual appearance,
which is quite nice in my opinion.

>> You seem to be right that it's suppressing most of the font-locking in
>> the highlighted area.
>
> It all but obliterates it.

... and yet, it simply _doesn't matter_, because highlighted regions are
_temporary_.  I use Emacs too, and I find the behavior very reasonable.

Font-Locking is nice, but it's very much secondary information, and
suppressing some of it when selecting a region (when your attention is
focused on the region), is just not a big deal -- indeed, I didn't even
_notice_ that font-locking colors were suppressed by the region on a tty
until you mentioned it!

>It obliterates hi-lock mode entirely.  I
> think it does this in GUI environments too.

Yes, because hi-lock uses the background.  This is probably not
particularly important.

> A blaring foghorn is temporary too.

... which is quite irrelevant, since your "foghorn" analogy is not
accurate; arguing by means of poor analogies is not useful.

> When I start Emacs 23 -Q, all of my buffers (loaded by desktop) are
> foghorned - I find Emacs in this state unusable.

All of your buffers have activated  regions when Emacs starts?

If so, _that_ sounds like a bug (so please try to send a test case);
needless to say, I think, I do not see this behavior.

> I agree with the logic here.  Region highlighting is incompatible with
> font lock and hi-lock.  Do you think that turning off font lock by
> default might be a good solution?

Of course not, since as far as I can see, there isn't actually any
problem.

It seems pretty obvious to me that all of this is much more a matter of
taste than anything else.  You have made your opinion on the matter very
clear, repeatedly.  The Emacs maintainers have made their best judgement
as to what the majority of Emacs users will prefer.  You know how to
turn off the highlighting.

-Miles

-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Gandhi