Remove or update the `--colors` option?

[egmontkob]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Midnight Commander version and build configuration

4.8.33, git

Operating system

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Is this issue reproducible using the latest version of Midnight Commander?

• I confirm the issue is still reproducible with the latest version of Midnight Commander

How to reproduce

Skin support appeared 16 years ago.

The --colors option is heavily lagging behind, both in the name of the recognized keywords, as well as documentation. I am pretty sure none of us feels like updating it.

Over time, conflicting keywords have also appeared in the skin file, under different sections. We have [menu]/menusel and [popupmenu]/menusel in the skins, they can't simply be flattened and both called menusel in the flat structure of the commandline option.

The ever-increasing number of colors makes it less and less useful to be able to override a few individual ones, or specifying an entire color scheme via this option. It's easier to copy a skin file to ~/.local/share/mc/skins and edit it.

Can we just simply remove the --colors command line feature?

Or if not then somehow we'd need modernize to automatically (without us ever having to maintain it manually) recognize all the skin file keywords, with their section names included, such as --colors core/selected=blue,green:menu/menusel=red,black etc.? Which would be a backwards incompatible change anyway. Is it worth it?

Expected behavior

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Actual behavior

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Additional context

No response

[egmontkob]

While at it, the list of the skin keywords in the manual page is also quite outdated.

[ossilator]

my best guess what the option could be meant for are quick overrides while designing a skin. but then, just having the skin open in an editor in another window/terminal would be even quicker.

i don't see how this could be actually used for customization; it's just not practical.

so i'm all for removing the option.

[egmontkob]

This is an area where actually it's easy to do a proper deprecation.

Just print a warning on startup that the option will be gone. It could go to stderr (less annoying than a popup). Maybe the user will only see it after quitting mc, that's fine.

Printing the warning could go e.g. to lib/skin/colors-old.c mc_skin_colors_old_configure().

We'd remove the code 2-3 releases (1-2 years) later.

Speaking of which... the MC_COLOR_TABLE env var should also be removed/deprecated in a similar fashion as it is equally unmaintained.