[darcs-users] proposal for whitespace annotation in darcs what

[Jamie Webb]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 04:37:26PM +0200, Gerhard Siegesmund wrote:
> I like the idea about only coloring the background. This way you still
> are able to copy'n'paste with the mouse in an xterm. If you changed the
> characters to something else you would copy them with the seletion.

Note that xterm does not colour the background underneath tabs, so they
would have to be converted to spaces. And of course \r and \n are zero
width, and so can't be shown by colouring, unless you want extra
spaces at the end of your pasted lines.

I think the more readable results with a changed foreground colour and
some subtle symbols are probably a bigger advantage. Compare:

printf "\033[34m_\t_\t\033[39mtest\033[34m.\033[39mtext\033[31m.\033[39m\n"
printf "\033[43m                \033[49mtest\033[44m \033[49mtext\033[41m \033[49m\n"

-- Jamie Webb