Yay: Formatting and Printing

[Morganamilo]

This is a centralised issue for discussing formatting and printing text to the user. This issue was created with the new install algorithm in mind but is not limited to that.

If you are suggesting a change It can be useful to provide images or markup examples of what you wish to see.

Planned Changes

• [x] Refactor escape codes from strings to dedicated functions
• [x] Add option to disable coloured output
• [x] Number menu for clean build and edit pkgbuild
• [x] Remove excess/unnecessary questions during install
• [ ] Add a (abort) option to y/n choices
  
  
  
  • Added in the number menu instead
  
  

Regressions

• [x] Colour formatting broken when showing difference in versions on upgrade menu

[Morganamilo]

Firstly I think wee need a refactor for most of the printing. I hate seeing magic escape codes in strings all over the code base and would much rather have these mapped to either const strings or functions.

For example the arrow prefix

==> 

Could be a constant.

While printing it in red could be achieved via a function.

fmt.Println(red(arrow + "Edit PKGBUILD?"))

[Jguer]

I would also add escape codes as an on by default option but an option nonetheless since I know some users prefer to have no color coding or it makes their custom setup display black on black or other weird contrasts.

[Jguer]

Just updated a machine that had seen no updates for 4 months. Good news, it worked. On other regards, if we're installing several packages maybe displaying a number menu of which to edit is better.

[Morganamilo]

Yeah that's a really good idea actually. I was just trying to follow along with pacaur, never thought of a menu.

[maximbaz]

• [x] Upgrade doesn't highlight correctly the exact difference in package versions anymore:

• [ ] Besides combining "Edit PKGBUILD" and "Clean build" questions into a number menu (which I think is an awesome idea), I feel there are still too many unnecessary questions such as "Proceed with download" / "Proceed with install". I can anyway cancel with Ctrl+C at any time, I see little need in these questions.

[Morganamilo]

For the first point it looks like the package name is just too long to be displayed fully. Can you confirm this doesn't happen on the release version?

Added the second point.

[maximbaz]

The problem is not with misalignment (it was always like that), the problem is with coloring. I can't make a screenshot right now as everything is up to date, but I'll try to explain... Previously it was highlighted what exactly is different in the versions, so for example in the picture above:

• community/shellcheck updated pkgrel, so 0.4.7 would be in the same color, but -2 and -3 would be highlighted
• core/cryptsetup updated minor version, so only the minor version would be highlighted (0 and 1).

Now for all packages the full version is red and pkgrel is white, regardless of what has actually changed.

[maximbaz]

Actually I can show a screenshot, it is easier to explain this way - look at the colors on the right side. I was not correct that for core/cryptsetup only the minor version is highlighted, it's the whole version that is highlighted.

[Morganamilo]

Yes it looks like you're right. Might have even been me in fact, I'm useless with terminal formatting.

[AladW]

The y/N prompts for each package get quite annoying when you have a package with many deps (for example, the various ros-* packages with over 200 AUR dependencies). At the same time, you don't want to miss out on viewing any of the relevant PKGBUILDs.

That's why an approach which displays all PKGBUILDs in one step is more efficient, for example through a suitable file manager.

[Jguer]

Colour formatting still needs to be fixed but to add to the regression list the left padding on version strings is an annoying but necessary thing to fix which has been akin to CSS (https://i.imgur.com/Q3cUg29.gif).

[maximbaz]

To add to the idea of displaying all PKGBUILDs in one step, I've just learned about another very cool trick that aurutils does - when you are upgrading a package, besides showing you PKGBUILD it also shows you a diff between the latest PKGBUILD and the one you installed last time. No need to review full PKGBUILDs every time you upgrade 🙂. It shows the diff as just another file among all PKGBUILDs, all of them are opened at once in vifm file manager.

[Morganamilo]

pacaur does that too. It's easy to do with git diff although we are not using the git method.

[Morganamilo]

Everything here is pretty much done. Closing.