Re: preview: What's cooking in git.git (Jun 2016, #10; Tue, 28)

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Junio,

On Wed, 29 Jun 2016, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 28 Jun 2016, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >
> >> * jk/ansi-color (2016-06-23) 7 commits
> >>   (merged to 'next' on 2016-06-28 at 354989c)
> >>  + color: support strike-through attribute
> >>  + color: support "italic" attribute
> >>  + color: allow "no-" for negating attributes
> >>  + color: refactor parse_attr
> >>  + add skip_prefix_mem helper
> >>  + doc: refactor description of color format
> >>  + color: fix max-size comment
> >> 
> >>  The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and
> >>  strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
> >> 
> >>  Will merge to 'master'.
> >
> > Please note that those "colors" do not work on Windows, at least as far as
> > I know, I only skimmed the code in set_attr():
> >
> > 	https://github.com/git/git/blob/v2.9.0/compat/winansi.c#L175-L314
> >
> > ... and it looks as if italic is plainly unsupported, and strike-through
> > is not handled.
> 
> This hopefully is a low-hanging-fruit for aspiring new developers in
> the Windows land, perhaps?

I think that winansi.c would already implement it if it were possible.
Probably there are no character attributes to change the font to italic in
the Win32 Console.

*me-goes-and-looks* Yep, that's the case:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682013.aspx

> We do not use italic/strike as a built-in default style for
> anything, so we do not have to wait for Windows support of these two
> attributes to appear to include this topic in the next release.
> 
> After all, users on "screen", or anything that translates these ANSI
> colors via termcap/terminfo, do not get them, either.  A user may
> try using these once, notices that her terminal lacks support, and
> would move on.

Yes, this was what I was getting at: I would appreciate it, along with
many Windows users, if we did not use any italic nor strike-through styles
by default, even in future versions.

It is fine, of course, to offer them for users to configure. After all, in
the default Git for Windows installation, the Win32 Console is not used,
but MinTTY, which is a full ANSI terminal emulator (so I'd wager a guess
that italic and strike-through are supported).

Not sure whether a comment in the documentation is warranted, though.

Ciao,
Dscho