On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, Lawrence Crowl wrote:
Yes, color can enhance the messages. I don't think we disagree on that. My point was that color is a harder problem that many people understand. For instance, there is no set of colors that meet web contrast standards against both black and white backgrounds.
If we output colored text to a terminal, the colors we will use there are those (usually 8 or 16) set up in the terminal. When you configure your terminal, setting an appropriate color palette is part of it, and when you change the background between light and dark, you also change the palette. Since other applications use colors, I would already be in trouble if they were not readable. So somehow I am not too scared.
As I understand the plan, the colors will be user-configurable, which goes a long way to addressing the problem because the user can choose colors that work for them. It would be nice if the default configuration worked for a large set of folks.
To confirm your point, clang managed to chose "bold black" as the default color for "note:", which is grey here but still not so visible on my black background :-(
With g++ that prints the context of an error first, I often have to carefully scroll many screens of messages until I find the first actual error, so some flashy color there could help.
The one thing I have found colors most useful for is coloring types that use a lot of templates. This has become less needed with g++ that uses intermediate types/typedefs to print a short type, but it was a great way to have the arguments at the same depth visible at a glance, and I still use it occasionally (also on the output of c++filt).
-- Marc Glisse
