Re: Gnus faces

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:

> Gnus defines a large number of faces for the Group, Summary, and
> Article buffers.  This makes it a pain for those who want impose a
> uniform color scheme on their Emacs, who must chage every one of these
> faces.

True.

> It would be better for the Gnus faces to :inherit from the standard
> Emacs font-lock faces.  After all, font-lock highlighting is not used
> in Gnus.  Thoughts?

Yes, that wouldn't be a bad idea.  Additionally, Gnus has different
faces for e.g. groups with respect to the backend (mail or news), the
level (1-4), and the "emptyness" (has unread or ticked articles or not),
so there are 16 different faces

  gnus-group-{mail,news}-{1,2,3,4}{,-empty}

just for customizing the face of groups in the *Group* buffer.  The
problem is that those faces don't inherit from each other.  So if I'd
like to make all non-empty groups underlined, I have at least to modify
8 faces.

IMHO, I'd have an inheritance hierarchy with a top-level "abstract"
(i.e., not really used face) gnus-group, that is specialized by
emptyness, then backend, and finally by levels.  (I think that in times
of fast internet connections, the levels are the least important thing.
I'd even go that far and remove their different defaults.  Feel free to
disagree.)

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
Sent from my Emacs