Re: Diff mode faces

[Juri Linkov]

>> The default diff face used to highlight changed lines on tty
>> (magenta/yellow bold italic) makes an indigestible fruit salad.
>
> In your opinion, perhaps.  These faces are there since 5 years ago,
> and I don't recall anyone complaining.

Maybe people prefer to quietly customize faces in .emacs instead of
spending energy arguing? ;-)

>> OTOH, the same face has no highlighting under X.  This makes
>> sense, because changed lines are the primary text in diff files
>> that doesn't need special highlighting.
>
> They need highlighting to stand out against the unchanged lines.
> Since most tty's don't have too many colors, they cannot make use of
> the technique similar to what we do on X, which is to dim the
> context lines by using light-grey colors for them.

Yellow foreground works well for context lines.

>> I propose instead of highlighting whole lines on tty to use at least
>> the same approach as introduced recently for comments on tty to highlight
>> only comment delimiters in new face font-lock-comment-delimiter-face.
>> Similarly, only diff indicators (the first character of the line) could
>> be highlighted in diff buffers on tty.
>
> I don't think this is a good idea to make such a change.  Certainly
> not now, before a release.

It is face fixing time now.

> Haven't we already seen enough trouble from this comment-delimiter
> face innovation?

Comment-delimiter face was the global change, diff faces are localized
to diff mode.

> Anyway, the results look IMHO ugly.  Partial highlighting of lines
> generally looks ugly, and this case is no exception.

Do you object against partial highlighting of comments on tty with
comment-delimiter too?  I tried to be consistent with comments
highlighting on tty.

> (I could never understand the urge to modify the default colors.  If
> you dislike the defaults, customize the faces and be done with them.)

I have 40 faces customized in .emacs and never wanted to suggest them
to anyone.  What I want is to propose fixes for badly chosen faces
according to more or less objective criteria such as that unimportant
faces should not stand out too much, important faces should be easily
readable, fg/bg colors should contrast well, etc.

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