Re: can we please define a face for compile.el mouseover?

[Stefan Monnier]

> When mouse-face highlighting is on a full line I find simple
> underlining better than a flashy background.  That's my preference,
> but the point is that mouseover highlighting on a long line has
> a different effect visually than it does on a short name or a button.

I see what you mean and I partly agree.  So part of the reason you want
a different face is because you mouse-highlight the whole line.
But admittedly, the regexps we use in compile.el seem to cover
potentially long chunks of text, even without extending them to cover
the whole line.  Maybe we should add a new face `long-highlight',
inheriting from highlight and use it in compilation, or on the contrary
maybe we should try and reduce the size of the mouse-highlighted text.

> rows and code lines, (c) buttons, and (d) mode-line constructs (treated
> generally as buttons, but worth treating as a separate case - as they in
> fact are).

BTW, the reason why mode-line-highlight is different is very simple: the
mode-line face is very different from the default face, so using
`highlight' for mouse-over on the mode line looks bad in most
configurations, including the default one.

>> So if there's a good reason why this particular case is likely to
>> happen to many users, a customization variable might be justified, but 
>> otherwise having a generic solution (e.g. face-remapping) seems quite
>> sufficient.
> Sigh.  Same song you've sung previously to defend hard-coding
> `highlight'...

Of course, it's the leading theme of software maintenance.


        Stefan