[pacman-dev] Please make the colourised output exactly like that of "pacman-color"

[Simon Gomizelj]

Xavion <xavion.0 at gmail.com> writes:

> To make things easier for you, I've just added screenshots showing the
> current 'pacman' (colourised) output to the album <http://imgur.com/a/DL4ky>.
> The main purpose of having the extra colours is to make it easier for the
> brain to pick out the important bits (as noted earlier in this thread).

Hey, late to the party, and I get the sense this patch set isn't going
to fly, so I hope I'm not adding salt to the wound.

I was the guy who originally got the colour support pushed into pacman.
The pacman-color patch was my starting point, so I thought I should
explain why I deviated and brought in less colours.

A lot of discussion happened again back then too, trying to decide what
should and shouldn't be coloured, if anyone wants to dive through the
mailing list archive.

What bothered me about the pacman-color patch was how half-hazard the
-Si/-Qi colouring is. The important bits (to me, of course) aren't
colourized. The repository and URL are not very important. Dependency
information, on the other hand, is. 90% of the time I search the pacman
database, what I care about is the description and the dependencies -
both demphasized with their implemented colouring scheme.

By attempting to colourizing individual fields IMHO we'll either end up
with a soup of colours that ends up more distracting then informational,
or we make the wrong choice, emphasizing the wrong stuff and making the
output harder to read. The current way is at least a nice balance that
doesn't fall into either pitfalls.

The pacman -Sl output, these days, is too colourful in my opinion and I
kinda regret it. I do wish it less bright. Something closer to only the
package name and maybe the "[installed]" bit should have colour.