Re: [binutils-gdb] Style the gdb welcome message

Maciej W. Rozycki
2019-10-19T11:21:07Z

On Tue, 15 Oct 2019, Andrew Burgess wrote:

> > I'm curious to hear what others think. In the absence of comments I'll
> > remove it sometime before 9.1, I think. Or I'll approve a patch to
> > do so.
>
> What this might mean is that if ~/.gdbinit contains only (or starts
> with) commands that produce no output, for example 'set style enabled
> off' then these would be processed before GDB printed the welcome
> message.

Thank you all who responded for your input.

As this is a matter of a human interface I realise that personal
perception will be very different among various people, from positive,
through neutral to disturbing. The classic single-colour interface is
uniform and does not, in my personal experience, cause any disturbance
or distraction to me. Other people may appreciate the highlighting.

I think a way to move forward might be to borrow from other GNU
projects, such as GCC and coreutils, and have an environment variable
defined called GDB_COLORS, analogously to GCC_COLORS or LS_COLORS, and
make GDB interpret it ahead of its usual initialisation files (which
could optionally override the environment settings).

Thoughts?

Maciej