Re: [RFC 0/8] add terminal styling to gdb

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>
> Date: Thu,  6 Sep 2018 15:12:55 -0600
> 
> I've wanted gdb to use colors on the terminal for a while now.  I've
> actually tried implementing this a few different ways at different
> times, the most successful approach so far being a colorizing frame
> filter.
> 
> This series takes a more direct approach, namely integrating the code
> into gdb.  The basic approach is to have gdb know how to emit ANSI
> terminal escape codes to control the color and style (currently just
> the intensity).  Then, cli-out is changed to style certain fields as
> it emits them.  However, because some places do not use ui-out, some
> ad hoc changes are also done.

This is a worthy goal, IMO, but please allow a level of abstraction
between output styles and ANSI escape sequences.  In particular, the
assumption that changing a style or switching text attributes (like
color, bold, etc.) requires to "emit" something to the terminal, is
not necessarily true.  Please allow for terminals where doing that
requires a function call that doesn't necessarily write anything to
the terminal.

Another, perhaps alternative possibility, would be to use
curses/ncurses features for controlling text color.

Finally, did you consider the use case of running GDB from Emacs (via
the old GUD, which uses CLI I/O)?  Would the color escapes be disabled
in that case, or would that require Emacs to interpret them?  Same
question for other front-ends which use CLI, if there are such.

Thanks.