Re: Guix search, colors and INSIDE_EMACS

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Pierre,
>
> I’m happy to discuss it further (to some extent at least, because there
> are other patches waiting for us to be reviewed :-)), but first, as I
> wrote in another message, I think the topic was not consensual and thus
> the series wasn’t ready to be pushed.

All the points have been addressed and I waited a period of 7 days.

Beyond this consideration, it's such a small patch, it does not break
anything for anyone, and we can always revert.

>> Many command line tools print colors properly in M-x shell.  I think
>> it's a misfeature to disable them in Emacs; I don't see any benefits.
>
> I understand the Eshell use case.  The shell-mode use case is one I’m
> interested in keeping as-is, that is: disable colors when INSIDE_EMACS,
> just like Coreutils, GNU grep, etc. do.

But why?

Colors used to work in Guix.  Now they are gone in Eshell / M-x shell.
It seems like a regression to me.

>> I find that printing just 1 result to be of little use in general.
>> So between printing all results and just 1, I have a preference for
>> printing all results.  But there are other solutions, see below.
>
> It’s not printing one result; it’s printing as many results as can fit
> on the screen.

It's usually just 1 or 2 results then :p

> I understand all this.  However, we’re not optimizing just for Eshell
> and shell-mode;

I was just fixing a bug that occured in Eshell / M-x shell, without
impacting other users.

> in fact, I’d argue that Emacs users should just use
> Emacs-Guix (we need to add M-x guix-search, actually!).

Emacs-Guix is not a drop-in replace for shell commands.  For instance,
guix search lets the user edit the results in an Eshell buffer.

Besides, Emacs-Guix is not really in sync with Guix, e.g. the lack of
channel support.

> For regular terminals, I think the two options that work well are:
>
>   1. Print (by default) as much as fits on the screen.
>
>   2. Automatically start a pager.
>
> I went with option #1, which was submitted at
> <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36390>.  The suggestion actually came
> from Bruno Haible: <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/35551>.

This is not changed by my patch.

> Just to say that there’s already been some thought put into it, and we
> have to carry the baggage of these past discussions now!

We are, I'm just including further thinking into the process, that is,
Emacs Eshell and M-x shell.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature