Subject: Re: bug#47574: 'match' face is too bright

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2021 21:26:15 +0300

On 03.04.2021 09:39, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2021 02:42:43 +0300
>>
>> Split off from the discussion in bug#47012.
>>
>> I think the current "yellow1" is too bright and in-your-face.
>>
>> It handles its goal (having the matched substrings noticed) admirably,
>> but perhaps too well, because we normally don't want to reach each
>> match, but rather the contents of the line around it. So I think it's
>> not productive putting so much visual attention on it.
> 
> If someone wants to see the lines without the match standing out, they
> can customize list-matching-lines-face to nil.  So this use case is
> already covered.

I'm talking rather about the other uses of the 'match' face: the Grep 
buffer, the Occur buffer, and the uses of the xref-match face (which 
inherits from 'match' now) inside the Xref buffer (xref-find-references 
or project-find-regexp).

My argument is that it's the dominant use case, so it's worth trying to 
improve the default configuration.

> FTR, I do want to see the match itself, so this face does its job for
> me very well.

Sure, I do too. From my experience, though, it's visible enough with any 
of the proposed colors. Even 'lemon chiffon', though I agree the result 
is fairly subtle.

>> Juri suggested #ffff88, and it seems good to me. Both readable and
>> noticeable, yet not too bright.
>>
>> My original suggestions were "lemon chiffon" (seems ideally subdued to
>> me, but it would be a drastic change), "khaki1" or "light goldenrod".
> 
> If we change the face's colors, we should make sure the new colors
> look well on both light and dark backgrounds.

My proposal is specifically for the light background (the min-colors 88 
case), with the default theme as the baseline.

Looking at the dark background color (and trying it with a couple of 
dark themes), I think it could use some toning down as well from 
RoyalBlue3 to RoyalBlue4, but others who prefer dark backgrounds can 
probably tell better.