Subject: Re: bug#9353: 24.0.50; default grep file name face is uglier now

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:24:14 -0400

> For one thing, it should not be bold.  We should almost never use a bold
> face as the default face for something, because boldness does not work
> well on some platforms and for some (many) faces.

I tend to agree, tho in this case part of the intention of grep-mode is
to make this part of the text less important since you don't need to
visit the file by hand but can just click on the link instead.

At least I think that's the only reason why noone complained about those
faces until now, even though they've been in use at least since Emacs-23.1.

> But there is also no logical connection to "success" here.

I don't know what's the connection either.  Maybe it's a "match success".

> Anyway, whatever you inherit from (but why must you always inherit?),

It's good to provide structure within the space of faces, so inheritance
is an important tool that should be used whenever possible, but of
course, we need to be careful to only use it when it really makes sense.
AFAICT the `success' face was created pretty much for this, so maybe the
problem is not the inheritance link but the name of the `success' face.

> the default appearance should not be ugly and difficult to read.  That
> just forces more users to customize it or live with the difficulty.

The default font I use is readable in bold, because giving up on such
a useful tool would be too bad (remember that I prefer to use the same
color everywhere and distinguish things based on bold/italics/font), but
that's just me.

I'm not opposed to tweaks for this face, tho a bright bold green seems
to work well in M-x compile (at least for my setup), so please consider
the impact on M-x compile when making those tweaks.

        Stefan