Re: Turning off colorization

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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I'm always amazed at how a group of smart people can too often over
complicate a question. This thread started with s relatively simple
usability question on whether font-lock was a good term wrt font colours.
We have then strayed off into related questions, but away from the original
question.

I agree font-lock is not a very intuitive name and could be improved. My
view is in line with David K's points. While syntax-highlighting may not be
100% accurate, it is a common term used to refer to different text being
displayed in different colours. I also prefer it over 'colorize' as it
avoids the issues associated with different spelling. Syntax is also a term
likely to be familiar with a majority of users - emacs is after all
primarily used by those involved in programming at some level.

The other points relating to vision impairments, colour blindness etc are
also interesting, but a side issue. As someone who has used emacs for
nearly 20 years and who has a sight impairment which requires tweaking of
colours, I can say things have improved immensely. Originally, I use to
spend hours defining an elisp file to customize all the faces and adding
new packages with their own face definitions was often a source of
frustration as you would need to then modify your setup. However, the
introduction of thems has made this a lot simpler. We do need to encourage
package writers to use default values derived from the standard set of
faces i.e. use inheritance rather than simply defining new faces with their
own colour settings as this will improve how themes work and often gives a
better result as too often, individual packages will not use the full
configuration i.e. don't define defaults for monochrome, tty etc.

There are already themes defined which will set colours that are typically
better for red-green colour blind and even monochrome themes for those who
prefer no colours. I think this is a good approach. The range of vision
impairments and individual requirements is far too broad for us to ever
hope to cater for everyone. Providing some basic themes which can then be
tweaked to suit individual tastes/needs is the way to go.

The critical requirement is to make it easy for people to find out how to
customize things. This means getting the names right, which is a really
hard thing to do. I would suggest adding both syntax-highlighting and
colorize-mode seem to be reasonable starting points to address this issue.
It would also be worthwhile ensuring the manual covers this and includes
links to the customize-theme stuff as experience has taught me you are much
better off starting with a theme close to your requirements and then
tweaking it than going through the tedious task of listing all the faces
and tweaking them individually.

Tim


On 7 November 2014 07:13, N. Jackson <nljlistbox2@gmail.com> wrote:

> At 11:02 -0400 on Wednesday 2014-11-05, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>
> > Someone posted a patch last year or so, that made it possible to tweak
> > in Elisp the computation of faces (IIRC it was around the discussion
> > of the fallback-background color, to try and dynamically compute the
> > background face to use for the region, so that it's always visible).
>
> Perhaps you are thinking of this message by Daniel Colascione?:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg01272.html
>
> Unfortunately, this very promising approach (which it seems would
> minimise the need for turning off "colourisation" in buffers just to be
> able to see the text) seemed to get derailed by bickering over defaults.
>
> Regards,
> N. Jackson
>
>
>


-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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