Nnn: Help screen is hard for perception

[tim77]

BUG REPORTS

Hello. This help screen [1] is hard for perception. Would be nice to move second block to right a little bit. Also would be nice to colorize hotkeys for better readability.

Environment details (Put x in the checkbox along with the information)

[x] Operating System: Fedora
[x] Desktop Environment: i3wm/GNOME
[x] Terminal Emulator: gnome-terminal/alacritty
[x] Shell: fish

[jarun]

Take a look at master. I recently cleaned it up a bit. Let me know if you have some suggestions to move around the entries further without having to shift a full column (that would add a number of bytes).

[tim77]

Version from master [2] looks definitely better. But TBH still think that nice to have colorized or bold hotkeys for better distinguish. Maybe this would be enough without shift a full column.

[2]

[maximbaz]

@jarun have you considered using \t to shift column? If you just go with a simple way of adding a new column of \t chars, it would at least not grow the binary by that much as it would if you added a column of say 8 spaces.

If the size is still a concern, you could expand \t yourself (say to 8 spaces) (so that \t has a predictable width, not dependent on users' PAGER) in show_help(), replacing the existing alignment with spaces - this way, you would actually _decrease_ the current binary size by quite a few bytes I think.

[maximbaz]

I completely agree that the current help is not very readable, most of all I dislike that different lines have different number of columns (most have two, but some have three).

[ignatenkobrain]

You can use libsmartcols (from util-linux) to make proper table printing...

https://karelzak.blogspot.com/2014/05/libsmartcols-pretty-output-for-everyone.html

[maximbaz]

Maybe a silly idea, but it was easy to implement, and imho already helps a lot, and also doesn't increase the binary size which seems to be a concern. https://github.com/jarun/nnn/pull/408

[jarun]

You can use libsmartcols (from util-linux) to make proper table printing...

No new deps please.

[jarun]

Maybe a silly idea, but it was easy to implement, and imho already helps a lot, and also doesn't increase the binary size which seems to be a concern.

Yeah, binary size is the main concern. People use nnn in custom initrds which are in MBs. So we are very particular about even byte-size gains.

[jarun]

Closed at commit f10481e93e3cd043c6314bdc343843764d380f24.