Re: [patch] selected/context colors

[Julian Foad]

Charles Levert wrote:
> Here is the selected/context colors patch, as discussed.
> Nothing else that was discussed is touched by this.
>
> I have attached a screen shot to be sure this
> is what everybody understands and wants.

Thanks very much for the good, helpful screen shot.

> +       * src/grep.c (print_line_middle, prline): Change logic so that
> +         lines with matches have their matched part properly handled ("mt"
> +         color or --only-matching), whether -v or not -v.

Ah - no, I didn't expect to see matches highlighted where they appear in 
context lines.  I think "grep -C3 -v s" means "show me the lines that don't 
contain an "s", with a few lines of context around them."  I don't want all the 
esses in the context lines to be highlighted; that's just a distraction from 
the parts that I want to see.

I can understand your point of view too, and I'm not absolutely 100% stuck on 
my current point of view, but I'd like to see some evidence, realistic examples 
or reasoning to convince me that highlighting matches in context lines is often 
useful and not often a distraction.

There will be some cases where it is definitely useful, and some cases where it 
is definitely a distraction.  If we can't be sure that one way or the other is 
both useful and safe (avoids annoying people) then we need to have a colour 
configuration option for it, making four related capabilities:

  selected-line    matched-text-in-selected-line
  context-line     matched-text-in-context-line

In fact, I can't see any drawback to having that set of capabilities.

(A detail: the old "GREP_COLOR" option should override 
"matched-text-in-selected-line" only, since no highlighting used to be done on 
context lines.)


Secondly, the log entry indicates that this patch also changes the behaviour of 
"-o".  We're discussing that in another thread and it shouldn't be done until 
we've decided.

- Julian