Re: 23.0.50; Middle w in of permissions in dired-mode is red and bold: dired-warning

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>> When testing Emacs 22 with `emacs -Q', I see that dired buffers are
>> almost unusable by default.  The red bold face for write permissions
>> is very distracting that prevents focusing on other parts of the dired
>> buffer.  I'm afraid Emacs users will hate us for this if we release
>> Emacs 22.2 with this annoyance.
>
> I haven't been paying attention here, so sorry if this has been
> discussed elsewhere in the thread.
>
> As far as I can tell, the face is meant to be distracting.  It's
> supposed to warn when files are writable by other users.  Why would
> this feature make Emacs users hate us?

I think no face should be distracting.  In very rare cases, a strong
color should indicate an error, so the user has to fix it immediately,
thus removing this error together with the face indication from the view.
In case of group/world write permissions, usually there is no error,
so no action is required from the user to remove write permissions
immediately after seeing them, because in most cases these permissions
are valid.  Often the user even can't change permission, for instance,
when a non-root user browses the /usr hierarchy that has group/world
write permissions on many files.

So file permissions should not be the first place to attract attention
of the user to after visiting a dired buffer.

> If you really really dislike (hate?) the warning face, one thing we
> could try is to make it red and non-bold on terminals that support
> colors.  If that's an acceptable compromise, then we can safely go
> ahead and make that change.

Actually a good face to use is font-lock-comment-delimiter-face
because it is not glaring as font-lock-warning-face.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/