Re: The defaults for Info

[Gavin Smith]

On 30 September 2015 at 22:40, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Personally, I detest all forms of terminal manipulation, be it reverse
> video, underlining, fake bold, colorization, or what have you.  For me,
> all such things merely distract from reading the content, which is what
> I'm interested in.  (For me, this is the case for everything, not just
> Info files.)

I agree to an extent. Adding colour to links makes the links easy to
find, but finding the links isn't the primary purpose of the text.
When someone looks at an Info node, they will probably start by
reading through the text, they won't immediately be looking for
cross-references.

At the same time, I don't think the "*note" syntax is very clear,
unless you have Info syntax drilled into your brain and you make sense
of it automatically, and I think it can be difficult to see where one
cross-reference ends and another begins. I think underlining is a good
way of marking cross-references without making them "pop" too much.

On the subject of bold, this sometimes makes text less legible when
using small fonts, depending on the user's setup, so its use should be
kept to a minimum.

I think marking the "active" link is very useful. It means you can
hold down the down key and quickly position yourself on a menu entry,
and helps when you have multiple cross-references in a single line,
you can know when you are in the right place to select the one you
want. I've been using bold for this myself, but I just tried it with
no underline (in distinction to the other links, which do have
underline), and it seems to work just as well, and also isn't as
obtrusive on occasions when the active link isn't what the user is
interested in, for example when the point has moved due to a search.

For search highlighting, reverse video is conventional, although bold
or bold and underline works as well. I think unlike link highlighting,
after a user has performed a search they are explicitly interested in
seeing where the matches are, so search match highlighting is
justified.

> Philosophically, I think there is a consistency, simplicity, and
> universality in making the defaults be "mode line in reverse video,
> everything else untampered with" which is lacking with any other policy.
>
> However, I recognize this is not a popular stance nowadays, , so I can
> only encourage you to do whatever you think is best for most users.

It's hard to know what users think - thus this email.

Also I think sometimes users don't know why they don't like something;
it's a feeling that they may not intellectualize.

People have said occasionally on the Internet that they prefer the
"pinfo" browser to "info", which does have link colourization by
default. (Although it's lacking in other features, like index lookup.)

> Re the header line, I also have been annoyed by its spilling over to a
> second line, wasting precious screen real estate.  However, hiding it
> completely feels somehow problematic to me.  Maybe another option would
> be to truncate it at the screen width.

I notice that the second line usually doesn't reach the start of the
"Next:" text on the first line, so if the "File:" and "Node:" parts
are hidden, it will usually fit on one line.

The header line is a visual clue that you've reached the top of a
node, which can be comforting.

I'm thinking of having an option to either hide the header line,
display it in its entirety, or hide the first part of it, and the
default would be the last.