Re: [PATCH v2] cli/show: add --format=pretty

[Hannu Hartikainen <hannu@hrtk.in>]

Thanks for the review!

On Sun, 04 Jul 2021 12:40:59 +0300, Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> wrote:
> The code looks good to me, just that these "hardcoded" color values gives
> me a bit of suspicion...

That's true and I do think the colors could eventually be configurable,
but right now I don't know how the configuration should work. Should it
be a palette, should each header have a configurable color (and should
the displayed headers be configurable too) etc. It's easy to make this
hugely bloated so I'll avoid going there until I have a clear idea of a
good, minimal approach.

> the colors look OK when background is dark (black). on light background
> (white) color 33 (yellow), color 36 (cyan) and color 32 (green) are
> somewhat hard to read (in decreasing hardness)...

Most terminals have user-configurable colors so I don't think this is a
showstopper. But as I said, yes, it would be best to make the colors
configurable.

> I did not try to apply this and see how those looks like when displaying
> real emails (no setup on this machine for now...)

Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/7dlP7lt.png

I'm happy to receive any suggestions but I think it's best to stay with
the original 3-bit spec (SGR codes 30-37, or in practice 31-36: red,
green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan) if the values are hardcoded. Those
are most widely supported.

> One option would be to first send this without color support and then
> add *configurable* color support -- I don't know which way is better
> but as a rewiever that would be easier to accept...

That's an excellent idea! I'll post PATCH v3 later. I don't really want
to try real feature detection because some terminals have weird corner
cases with their ANSI sequence support. `isatty` is what other CLI tools
tend to use as default AFAIK.

Hannu