Re: new *Help* argument highlighting

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I think you're wrong.  There's a lot of problems with adding colors.
> Sure. But we already have lots of faces, some of which add colors with
> not much remorse:

I know, but you were saying that there is some resistance against adding
highlighting, and I think the resistance is more against colors.
The reason why the two are often mixed is because indeed most highlighting
adds color (believe me, I don't like that: the fist thing I did when
I tried font-lock was to remove all colors (other than grey for comments)
and restrict myself to bold/italics.  Nowadays I live with colors on
various faces for the simple reason that there are too many faces and
I don't have the time/energy to customize them all to something else).

> (defface smerge-mine-face

Funnily, for SMerge, I think colors are the way to go (in my setup at
least) because those faces are added to the ones normally added by
font-lock, so since my font-lock faces don't use colors, my smerge faces
are properly combined with the font-lock ones.

>> As said, it's not the fact of highlighting that surprises, it's just the
>> fact that args and only args are highlighted as if they were so
>> very special.
> Aren't? In an elisp function's help, I honestly don't know what else
> could be special... Perhaps if we had a more structured style guide for
> function docstrings, with sections à la:

Well I find the highlighting attracts my eye to the arguments, but not to
the text that surrounds it, whereas I don't care so much about the argument
as I care about the text.

Basically, my reaction is "Hmm... the argument OVERLAY is used three times
in the docstring; now, why should I care?".


        Stefan