Re: [Lynx-dev] Getting color output to work...

[L A Walsh]

Thomas Dickey wrote:
> That's interesting.  However: of the available text-browsers:
>
>         lynx uses curses
>
>         w3m uses termcap
>
>         (e)links(2) is hardcoded, using neither curses nor termcap
>
> While lynx does use curses, its color-style feature uses 
> only the tag-types  for coloring.  It doesn't pay any 
> attention to the font-coloring feature
> (which appears to have been rarely used in the 1990s
> when RP came up with
> color-style).  Since knowing the tag type is more interesting than the
> occasionally-used font-color, it's been hard to be motivated about that
> feature.
---
RP? I'm a bit confused by the above.  How does color style 
differ from color settings on font or background?

I can imagine the font coloring feature not being widely used
for webpages, since designers are dinged for pages that aren't
color-blind friendly (among other things), but also because
I don't see it being very useful except to harmonize a font color
with a page design.  Certainly using different fonts for different
words/chars on a page would be somewhat rare, but I do see it on
sites that present code and have their own highlighting option.

The neat thing about the vim option, is that you can get many
different mappings for the highlighting by using color schemes
(not that I'm trying to sell vim!).  

> fwiw, I generated all of the colored-text examples on my main website using
> vile (with a different syntax/html program).  In a quick check, marked-up
> text is 14% of the content (counting lines with css markers).  About 80%
> of _that_ is due to a couple of marked-up copies of the terminfo database:
>
>         http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html
>         http://invisible-island.net/xterm/terminfo.html
>
> That leaves less than 3% for the various colored examples in discussion.
>
> So it's useful...
---
        Am not sure what you mean by it being useful because it
leaves less than 3% for various colored examples...?  

        I've seen some sites which present code offer on-page
buttons-as-selectors of color themes to change the highlighting colors,
but I'll be darned if I can find it now... :-(

> (as usual, if someone supplied patches to implement this in lynx,
> I'd help with the process)
---
        Would have to think about whether or not it was the
best way to get to my "goal".  Often, I display code using "less", 
and it looks so "plain" compared to what I see in Vim.  It's harder
to read in less.  I've "fiddled" with my color setup in vim, though,
to add various highlighting groups over the years for shell and
perl -- to help my groking the code, but also for aesthetic reasons.

        Anyway, I just wanted the ability to use a pager like
less (aliased to more by many), to display text, with vim-like
syntax highlighting.

        That may be a bit of a challenge!  Erg!
-l

P.s. Noticed a side effect of attaching the HTML -- when I viewed my
earlier message in Tbird, it appeared in a semi-reverse font.  
Interesting!