Re: Reopen bug 535: Problem with highlit regions on Linux virtual terminal

[Alan Mackenzie]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 06:30:28PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> >> You seem to be right that it's suppressing most of the font-locking
> >> in the highlighted area.

> > It all but obliterates it.

> ... and yet, it simply _doesn't matter_, because highlighted regions
> are _temporary_.  I use Emacs too, and I find the behavior very
> reasonable.

Why does the temporariness make something not important?  Temporary
things are very important.  I'm sensitive to things which flash and bang,
which is one of the main reasons I've loved Emacs so much - up till now,
it has never flashed and banged by default.

> Font-Locking is nice, but it's very much secondary information, and
> suppressing some of it when selecting a region (when your attention is
> focused on the region), is just not a big deal -- indeed, I didn't
> even _notice_ that font-locking colors were suppressed by the region
> on a tty until you mentioned it!

It's a big deal for me.  Probably for lots of other TTY users, too.  And
if font-locking is secondary, surely region highlighting is tertiary?
The normal Emacs default for such personal preferences has always been to
be restrained - surely lots of people like angry fruit salad font lock
faces, but we don't make them the default.

> >It obliterates hi-lock mode entirely.  I think it does this in GUI
> >environments too.

> Yes, because hi-lock uses the background.  This is probably not
> particularly important.

Again, I think it is.  I don't think it's been discussed here at all.

> All of your buffers have activated regions when Emacs starts?

They all have hilit regions when Emacs starts.

> If so, _that_ sounds like a bug (so please try to send a test case);

Ah, OK.  I don't have the background to judge.  ;-)

> needless to say, I think, I do not see this behavior.

No, you do in fact need to say this.  You're saying that when you start
Emacs with a desktop, your buffers don't have highlit regions, yes?  Mine
do.  My .emacs.desktop was first created by Emacs 21 in ~4004 BC, and
currently gets renewed in Emacs 22, and occasionally loaded into Emacs
23.  Maybe that has something to do with it.  I'll have a look sometime.

> > I agree with the logic here.  Region highlighting is incompatible
> > with font lock and hi-lock.  Do you think that turning off font lock
> > by default might be a good solution?

> Of course not, since as far as I can see, there isn't actually any
> problem.

> It seems pretty obvious to me that all of this is much more a matter of
> taste than anything else.

Yes.  Normally, in matters of taste, Emacs's defaults incline towards the
restrained, conservative.  Here we have a glaring exception.

> You have made your opinion on the matter very clear, repeatedly.  The
> Emacs maintainers have made their best judgement as to what the
> majority of Emacs users will prefer.

No, not at all.  On the specific matter of the interaction between region
hilighting and font-locking/hi-locking, I raised a bug report last
summer, as requested by Stefan.  Until yesterday there had been no
discussion of it at all, as far as I am aware.

> You know how to turn off the highlighting.

Yes of course.  But for a "mere" user, it's very difficult to find this
out.

> -Miles

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).