Subject: Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: David Kastrup <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:32:51 +0200

Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]> writes:

> Matthieu Moy wrote:
>
>> I am personally in favor of changing the default to drop the S. Silently
>> hiding stuff from the user's eyes is really bad. With good coding
>> standard and reasonable terminal size, it actually doesn't matter.
>
> Just for clarity: no, when we are talking about well formatted code,
> -S is actually a way better interface.

When we are talking about well-formatted code, -S does not matter either
which way.

> That's because indentation matters and makes it easy to take in code
> structure at a glance, long lines that get cut off by the margin stick
> out like a sore thumb already, and lines wrapped at an arbitrary
> character are even more distracting to the point of being useless.

Lines which are cut off are not "to the point of being useless", they
_are_ useless.

I am not arguing that wrapped lines are pretty.  And I also consider the
"malicious" or "hiding" angle at best a marginal concern.

Overriding less' defaults should only be done for unequivocal benefits,
and in this case I consider the result actually more of a detriment than
anything else.

-- 
David Kastrup