Subject: Re: Man pages have colors? A deep dive into groff

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 May 2021 01:28:49 +0000

On 2021-05-17 at 16:48:04, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> This looks much better.
> 
> I wonder a good follow-up (hint, hint! :) would be to have
> exec_man_man() and exec_man_cmd() in builtin/help.c set this depending
> on color.ui (so we'd do it by default with "auto").
> 
> Then e.g. "git help git" would look prettier than "man git".

As I mentioned on the patch itself, I'd prefer if Git didn't do this.  I
have my own colors configured and don't want Git to render its man
output differently from what I have.  Even if I didn't, I wouldn't want
Git to change the output of man(1) to be different from what's on the
system.

I should point out that I have my shell configuration set up to use
different colors depending on the capability of the terminal, such as
using a 256-color palette when that's supported and a 16-color palette
when it's not, so there is literally no configuration that Git can
provide here that matches my existing settings.

Additionally, colors tend to pose accessibility problems for a lot of
people.  I have normal color vision, but because I use a transparent
background which renders as grey, the standard terminal red is nearly
illegible for me.  I also know people with colorblindness who have
problems with various colors or any colors at all.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US