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Re: Introducing face in comments for various modes

From: Thibaut Verron
Subject: Re: Introducing face in comments for various modes
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2022 11:50:52 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.4.2 

On 12/12/2022 11:20, Heime wrote:

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, December 12th, 2022 at 9:58 AM, Thibaut 
Verron<thibaut.verron@gmail.com>  wrote:



On 12/12/2022 10:21, Heime wrote:


------- Original Message -------
On Monday, December 12th, 2022 at 8:49 AM, Thibaut Verron
thibaut.verron@gmail.com  wrote:


Le lun. 12 déc. 2022 à 04:01, Heimeheimeborgia@protonmail.com  a
écrit :

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, December 12th, 2022 at 2:24 AM, Heime
heimeborgia@protonmail.com  wrote:


------- Original Message -------
On Sunday, December 11th, 2022 at 5:40 PM, Stefan Monnier via

Users list for the GNU Emacs text editorhelp-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
wrote:

BTW, there is a related convention in ELisp code where

comments that

start in column 0 and which are introduced with 3 or more

semi-colons

are considered sectioning headers (where ";;;" means a top-level
header, ";;;;" a subheader, ";;;;;" a subsubheader, ...).

I'd be happy if Emacs were changed to highlighting those.

Stefan

If you are colourising "Sectioning Headers", ensure that vibrant
and good contrast:

1) betweenthe text and the background;

2) and between a header, subheader, subsubheader, ...

Use some colour metric (e.g. using the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines [WCAG]).

Because I consistently see that developers almost never care (or
have the skills)
to properly set up colours. Have suggested changing the colour
scheme as described,
for "Org Headings" because they are indistinguishable against a
dark background and
between a heading and its subheading. Applying such metrics have
been turned down,
with the excuse that if I want them right, I have to work on
emacs customisations
myself, as the crappy colours are there to stay.


The colors of the standard themes are chosen with its (light)
background in mind. If you change that background, it is not
surprising that things fall apart.

Choosing colours with a light background in mind is the wrong approach
because colours produce far greater visual
impact.


There is no right or wrong approach, but individual preferences.

Standard metrics exist.  The Gnu Project like many others, does not
want to use them.
You're moving the goalpost: the sentence I quoted claimed that "focusing on a light background is the wrong approach".
It's also factually not true that the GNU project does not care about readability metrics, especially now that the Modus themes are shipped with Emacs. 


If you want a dark background, just use a dark background theme. For
instance, emacs has a built-in implementation of the tango dark color
palette. If contrast if your primary concern, you should look at the
modus themes (modus-vivendi for the dark background), which is also part
of emacs now.

M-x customize-themes and make your choice.

If you use "modus-vivendi" for org-mode, the colours are all almost white,
a big problem particularly when you fold the org headings.


I don't like dark backgrounds, but it seems perfectly readable to me.
Anyway, from personal experience the developer of the Modus themes is extremely responsive. If you have a problem with his themes you should take it up with him. 


Rather, there there should be carefully chosen colour settings for
both light and dark backgrounds.


That's how you end up with settings which are at best acceptable, but
not perfect, for both light and dark backgrounds. The range of colors
which are suitable for both light and dark backgrounds is just too narrow.

The proper way is the current way: carefully curated themes implementing
all colors in a consistent ways.
What metrics are being used. The blind belief that the proper way is the 
current way, is the origin of the problem.
For one, the Modus themes were developed with quantified metrics (minimal contrast ratio afaik), and they are two completely different themes for black and light backgrounds.
If you think you can do better, you are welcome to try. But if you come and claim that the current way is the wrong way, the burden of proof is on you. :) 



It is not a new problem, but it doesn't mean that you have to

customize all the individual faces yourself. Instead, you should look
for a theme implementing


the colors you like, and install it. The responsibility for having
consistent colors across all emacs fonts is on the theme designer.
You can still tweak some
faces from there if you choose to of course.

At any rate, Stefan's suggestion would not require making new design
choices, as there are already faces designed for fontifying headers:
outline-1, outline-2, etc.

Making a new design choice is a necessity if you want to move forward.


No. The question is whether to fontify those headers, how to identify
them, etc.

That's completely separate from the question of changing the face
currently used for headers in other places.


Those faces are used by outline-mode, but not by outline-minor-mode
(which emacs-lisp-mode uses to implement the ;;; comment headers) at
the moment.

Which proves my point that changes are necessary. What needs to be
done is for colour contrast metrics
to be taken seriously by all packages, rather than relying on some
theme to fix the crappy default choices.


Sorry to be blunt, but you couldn't be more wrong. For a start,
outline-mode and outline-minor-mode are the same package. :)

But more to the point, with the current system, packages choose existing
faces to implement coloring based on what they should color (e.g. is
it a comment, is it a header, is it a keyword, is it something
important). And the theme designers choose colors (and other features)
for those faces.

As a result, colors are the same across all of Emacs (for example
comments look the same in elisp and python), and -- if the theme maker
is competent -- the colors will implement good contrast and be readable
everywhere.

One can at least use good metrics for light (white) and dark (dark) background.
We have not even arrived at that yet.  I am not arguing against comments looking
the same, but that there should specific settings for the canonical white and
black background as minimum.


And I am telling you that there are.

For light background: the default theme, leuven, tango, modus-operandi
For dark background: the default theme with inverse-video, tango-dark, modus-vivendi 




If instead we were to let each package decide on its colors, Emacs would
look like a Christmas tree with different colors all over the place. And
most of them would be really crappy because the package developer was
never trained in graphic design, or because they didn't plan for all
possible background colors (it's not as simple as light and dark, some
people use blue, or green backgrounds), or because they didn't predict
that their choice of color would conflict with the choice made by a
minor mode in another package, or...

Am only discussing for white background and black background, which are the
canonical settings for printing.  With colour contrast you are limited by
the metric values which limits to about eight colours.
It is not Christmas Tree as you say.  Focusing on any possible colour 
combination
(blue, or green backgrounds) is beyond the scope of my discussion.
No it's not. My point is that if you leave the responsibility of choosing colors to packages as opposed to themes, it will be a Christmas tree and there will be unpredictable combinations. It's a direct consequence of your idea, you can't just wave it off.
It's already bad enough now with some packages defining their own faces without at least inheriting from the standard ones.
There are currently 5330 packages on Melpa. Do you plan to contact the authors of all of them individually to get them to implement your preferred colors?
With the current approach, on the other hand, it's very easy: report a bug for the theme you're using, or make your own theme if you really want to. 


You shouldn't think of themes as "fixing the default choices"
(especially considering that you are the one "breaking" them by
insisting to use them with a background they weren't designed for).
Their purpose is to implement different choices in a consistent way.

Good design in much more important that consistency.


It's also much easier to achieve in a consistent system.



Heime [2022-12-11 15:35:41] wrote:


The following uses `hi-lock` to change the foreground of

comments matching

a regexp. This is implemented for emacs-lisp files where

comments start

with ";;".

I would like to extend this for other programming languages

besides emacs-lisp

files, using the relevant comment character automatically

for that language.

(defface elfa-face
'((t :foreground "magenta"))
"Face for comment headings.")

(defun elfa-regexp (&optional actm)
"Identify comment category ';; [Category]'."
(highlight-regexp
"^;;\s+\\[.+\\].*$" 'elfa-face))

(defun elfa-category ()
"TODO."
(interactive)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.el\\'" . hi-lock-mode))
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'hi-lock-mode t)
(add-hook 'hi-lock-mode-hook 'elfa-regexp))
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