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

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Sat Apr 2 18:33:03 UTC 2005


On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 06:15:53PM +0100, Jamie Webb wrote:
> 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.

That's sad! :( And here I was so looking forward to having colorized tab
characters!

I suppose using eight spaces instead would have the advantage that the
extra space occupied by the +/- wouldn't mess up alignment... except in
cases where someone relies on tabs indenting up to a tab stop.

> 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"

I don't know, I find your understores potentially *too* unobtrusive.  I do
think, however, that we shouldn't mark up ordinary spaces unless they are
trailing at the end of the line.  Then we also wouldn't have to mark up
newlines, although '\r' would remain an open question.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




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