Let's paint those bikesheds^Werror messages!

Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Jun 27 14:45:03 PDT 2017


On Tuesday, 27 June 2017 at 21:10:37 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
> Intended to be more of the latter, especially as a consequence 
> of the readability concern. The typical colorful syntax 
> highlighting that is often used (lets say like the Monokai 
> theme), starts to break down when it isn't used within its own 
> context. Instead it starts to fight for attention with the 
> error message and with the other colored text parts. The result 
> can then be a net loss in visual structure.

Hmm, that may be true, but I'm not sure if it can be quantified. 
Our only numbers are individuals' preferences, and so far this 
change seems to be in the favor of many.

> Apart from color, there are other possible means to fix this, 
> for example adding vertical spacing or delimiters between 
> separate error messages.

That will certainly be worth considering should we make more 
error messages span multiple lines as clang does.

> True, and IMO, the former is what should be our primary goal. 
> When that is reached, aesthetics can be optimized. But if we 
> don't improve readability with this, what's the point of this 
> feature?

I don't think readability isn't improved (unless you refer to the 
original choice of colors, in which case I agree) :)

> But surely better than a light gray or white on white. 
> Otherwise the whole text needs to have some kind of highly 
> saturated color to avoid such situations by default. Just 
> ruling out a white background would be a bad idea. I think on 
> macOS that's the default, for example.

I don't know where the repeated false impression that we're 
ruling out white backgrounds is coming from in this thread, when 
it can be dispelled with one click. I specifically test the 
default color scheme of the default terminal application on macOS.



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