Re: [PATCH] ncurses based config V2

Hi.

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 1:52 PM, Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,

sorry, it seems I missed this mail.

On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 08:41:56AM +0300, Nir Tzachar wrote:
Hello.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 11:27:00AM +0300, Nir Tzachar wrote:
Changes:
1) Fixed segfaults in help window.
2) Removed the instructions window, made the instructions appear as a button
which displays a popup window.
3) Added hot keys support. As ncurses does not support several colors inside
a menu, keys are highlighted using "()".
4) Optimized for 80x24 terminals.
6) Fixed zconf.y to use _menu_init
7) added nconfig to "make help"
8) Misc fixes.

Comments are appreciated.

OK, I've just tried it. Here are the first comments I can make :

- colors are too dark. Cyan on black is barely readable, red on black is
almost unreadable and blue on black is not readable at all, I have to
switch off the light to read it. Most often you'll see light shades of
grey (even white) in interfaces because it's hard to see dark shades,
and bright flashy letters would dazzle and be seen as fuzzy. Many colors
are perfectly readable on while or even light grey (except yellow and
sometimes cyan). Blue backgrounds were often used under DOS and were
OK with almost all colors except red (well-known eye focus problem).
But there was a trick, pixels were very large in 640x200, nowaydays
we have small pixels and letters are not much readable anymore on blue
backgrounds. For your tests, you can try to load
xterm -bg <color> -fg <color> and ensure that you're using a medium
font (tickness of 1-pixel).

The thing with colors is that they are very personal...

"personal" is true when it comes from a matter of taste. Here it's a matter
of readability.
The colors I
have work great on my terminals. I don't think I can come up with one
scheme which looks nice to everybody, hence the support for color
schemes.

I understand. I think that the original colors of make menuconfig are
OK and readable everywhere.

But they give it a very archaic look. We should come up with something better.

If you can come up with a color scheme which works gr8 for
you, I'll be happy to add it. If you are interested, check the
INIT_PAIR macros of the patch.

OK I might do (I just don't have time right now).

That would be gr8.

- pressing arrows too fast regularly escapes (probably because of the
ESC prefix, I don't know). This is rather strange, because no other
application does this to me.

I cannot reproduce this. What terminal emulator are you using, and
which ncurses version?

I've just checked, ncurses-5.3. I also ensured that it's the same I
use with all my other progs (including mutt, vim, emacs, alsamixer,
less, gnuplot, kismet, lynx, ...). It is possible that there is something
very subtle, but I can't imagine what :-/

I can't reproduce this. I tried with ncurses 5.3 and a clean xterm,
and it works ok. Try to
$> export TERM=vt100 before and tell me if this helps. In any way, can
you please send me your termcap file? I'm grabbing at straws here...

Also, can you please send me the terminal emulator config file?

It's just a bare xterm running with TERM=xterm-color. I forgot to test on
the console.

Is there a specific initialization
sequence with ncurses to state that arrows should return special codes
instead of the ESC prefix ? (I have no idea)

Yes. You need to specify you want to get keypad events, otherwise they
just appear as ESC.

OK. I just found there is the ESCDELAY variable to define the ESC timeout.
They also talk about notimeout() in curs_inopts(3), which sounds pretty
well related to what I observe.

They do not have the same effect. Using ESCDELAY is a hack, but there
is no better option to get a plain ESC key without a timeout.

[skipping all fixed reports]

- I'm not convinced that the parenthesis around hotkeys make the menu
that much readable, especially when there are lots of short words or
even acronyms. Eg :
[ ] (U)TS namespace
[ ] (I)PC namespace
[ ] (U)ser namespace (EXPERIMENTAL)
[ ] (P)ID Namespaces (EXPERIMENTAL)

I agree, but could not come up with any other visible mark to note the hotkey.

I don't know if there is something such as a bold attribute in ncurses,
it would make sense to use it IMHO because you don't force a color on
people's terms, you rely on the style which works well for them.

There is a bold attribute, but you cannot set it for a single letter
of a menu item, as far as I know.

OK I understand. You might want to use the brighter color set (as menuconfig
does). Terminals sometimes translate them to bold characters.

All the text in a menu item must be in the same color and with the
same attributes. There is no way to emphasize a single section, either
by coloring it differently or making it bold.

I'm sorry I don't go further for now, the arrows causing frequent exits is
too bothersome, I've started it about 30 times just for this report, it's
too hard to navigate. I hope that the points above are already helpful.

Thanks for the input. I would really like to solve the issue you have
with arrow keys. Can you also send a trace of key presses which cause
you to exit, and which window is active?

Sorry, the directory in which I built has been removed since. But it happened
in any window, starting with the main menu. That's why I think it's just an
initialization issue.

What do you mean by an "initialization issue" ?

Thanks.
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