escape-glyph issues

escape-glyph issues

[Miles Bader]

Juri made the following change without discussion:

   2005-06-06  Juri Linkov  <juri@jurta.org>

           * faces.el (escape-glyph): Use less loud colors pink2 and red4.

I think this looks far worse on a dark background (it plays the neat
trick of being both less visible and more annoying at the same time; I
have no opinion on light-background mode as I don't use it).

Unless someone can justify this change, I'm going to change it back to
the old default (cyan) -- which was decided after _much_ argument.

Furthermore, Juri's "no escape for NBSP" change was also made with no
discussion, and the related thread sort of petered out after talking
about implementation issues.  So which do people like better?

-Miles
-- 
Is it true that nothing can be known?  If so how do we know this?  -Woody Allen

Re: escape-glyph issues

[Juri Linkov]

> Juri made the following change without discussion:

I made this change to let all people try alternative colors
and tell whether they like these colors better.

>            * faces.el (escape-glyph): Use less loud colors pink2 and red4.
>
> I think this looks far worse on a dark background (it plays the neat
> trick of being both less visible and more annoying at the same time;
                      ============

This is the main difference between your preferred colors and colors
proposed by me.  I selected less visible colors intentionally.

The initial purpose of highlighting control codes and nbsp with
escape-glyph was to not help users to find all such characters in the
buffer, but to inform users that displayed ASCII characters are
different from real characters.

Using too loud colors would be annoying for most users.  It is
very like turning show-trailing-whitespace with its bright red on
by default.  It helps users to see trailing whitespace when
enabled deliberately, but by default highlighting the trailing
whitespace is annoying.  The same applies to escape-glyph.
Moreover, show-trailing-whitespace is a buffer-local variable that
can be set on a per-buffer basis.  With escape-glyph users can't do
that.

The colors I proposed are less loud but still distinguishable from the
default foreground color.

> So which do people like better?

It's pity we have no formal voting process like other projects have.
It would let resolve such issues easily.

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

Re: escape-glyph issues

[Miles Bader]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:
> It helps users to see trailing whitespace when
> enabled deliberately, but by default highlighting the trailing
> whitespace is annoying.  The same applies to escape-glyph.

I think the color you chose is in fact _more annoying_; perversely, it's
less easy to locate such characters in the buffer -- it's `fuzzy', one's
eye has some notion that there's something wrong, but one can't quite
see what it is (perhaps this is why it's annoying).

> The colors I proposed are less loud but still distinguishable from the
> default foreground color.

[You didn't "propose", you changed it; the argument that you were doing
to allow others to try it out sounds like weasel wording to me.]

This exact issue (the color of the escape-glyph face) was argued about
at great length, and the colors you changed were the result.  Maybe you
weren't aware of the previous argument about it.

Anyway, I will change it back.

-Miles
-- 
Come now, if we were really planning to harm you, would we be waiting here,
 beside the path, in the very darkest part of the forest?