Re: Turning off colorization

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > M-x font-lock-mode will turn off colorization, but it's not a name
>   > > that will come to a user's mind very easily.  How about making
>   > > colorize-mode an alias for font-lock-mode?
>   > >
>   > > Also, how about putting it in the Options menu?
>
>   > Why not "syntax-highlight-mode"?
>
> There's nothing wrong with that name,
> but it's not what a user will think of.
> What the mode normally does is put the text in color.
> A user will think of typing M-x color TAB
> to look for a name.
>
> So I think it should have the name colorize-mode.
>
> If it also has the name syntax-highlight-mode, that is fine too.

Syntax highlighting is an established term for this.  Even the
description of font-lock-mode has the summary

    Toggle syntax highlighting in this buffer (Font Lock mode).

and every editor capable of doing it calls it "syntax highlighting".
Colorization, in contrast, is a much more generic term missing the
connotation of the _meaning_ with which colors are assigned.

I don't see the point in diverging from established terminology here: as
opposed to kill/yank (vs cut/paste) we do not have mnemonic keybindings
riding on our original terms.

If I do "man vim", I read

       There  are a lot of enhancements above Vi: multi level undo, multi 
win\u2010
       dows and buffers, syntax highlighting, command line  editing,  filename

If I do apt-cache search -f bluefish, I get

     fully featured image insert dialog; thumbnail creation and automatically
     linking of the thumbnail with the original image; and configurable HTML
     syntax highlighting.

    Package: winefish
    Description-md5: 0c545214eec1a9e30aec3c9e8f9c296d
    Description-en: LaTeX Editor based on Bluefish
     Winefish is a GTK+ based LaTeX editor, which was forked from Bluefish.
     The main features are autotext, auto-completion, function references,
     syntax highlighting, customizable external tools and UTF-8 support.

If I do apt-cache search -f emacs, I get far, far too many entries.  The
very first mentioning _anything_ along the kind of font-locking is

    Description-en: A Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) editing mode for Emacs
     This is a simple Emacs mode for editing CSS style sheets. It adds
     font-locking and some basic auto-indentation support to Emacs. It
     works with Emacs 19.34, but should also work with both older and
     newer versions as well as XEmacs.

The next is

    Package: erlang-mode
    Description-md5: 458834bc6eb6df394adfd308669076f9
    Description-en: Erlang major editing mode for Emacs
     This package includes the mode for editing Erlang programs in GNU Emacs.
     It is provided with the default Erlang/OTP distribution. It supports
     sophisticated indentation, syntax highlighting, electric commands,
     module name verification, comments, skeletons, tags etc.


Really, this battle is over.  And in this case, I see no point in
digging up its grave.

-- 
David Kastrup