Let's paint those bikesheds^Werror messages!

[Sönke Ludwig via Digitalmars-d]

Am 27.06.2017 um 22:35 schrieb Vladimir Panteleev:
> On Tuesday, 27 June 2017 at 20:19:14 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
>> I would argue pretty strongly that this should be toned down as much
>> as possible.
>
> From the perspective of a personal preference, or an objective analysis?
> It sounds like the former but isn't worded as one.

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.

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

>> All example schemes in the PR so far don't seem to add any real
>> readability value overall.
>
> Readability and aesthetics are distinct goals!

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?

>
>> Using a uniform dark gray background color for code could then solve
>> two issues: visually separating text from code and avoiding the
>> problem with differently configured default colors in the terminal.
>
> Fairly sure painting parts of a line with a dark gray background is not
> going to look great on an otherwise dark-on-light terminal. The terminal
> excerpt blocks on dlang.org look kind of jarring already:
> http://dlang.org/dmd-windows.html#library
>

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.