[Python-Dev] Impaired Usability of the Mercurial Source Viewer (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Apr 1 02:28:27 CEST 2011

On 3/31/2011 7:15 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

The Hg source viewer needs to be tweaked to improve its usability. What we've got now is a step backwards from the previous svn viewer.

Looking at http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/default/Lib/linecache.py for example, there are two issues. 1) the code cannot be cut-and-pasted because the line numbers are commingled with the source text. 2) the code is hard to read because of the alternating white and gray bars. Contrast that to the more typical, beautiful presentations with a solid background and the ability to cut-and-paste without grabbing line numbers:

I complete agree with this. The bars are for super long lines, especially of data, as with 132 char Fortran output on old ibm printers. Even then, the bars were 3 lines wide. 80- char text lines do not need them.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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