Re: Which runtime files for console vim?

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Gary Johnson wrote:

> On 2012-03-01, howardb21 wrote:
>
>> On Mar 1, 7:05 pm, Gary Johnson <garyj...@spocom.com> wrote:
>>
>>>     Vim can display the matches in a simplistic popup menu.
>>>
>>>     The menu is used when:
>>>     [...]
>>>     - The terminal supports at least 8 colors.
>>>     [...]
>> [...]
>
>> [...] Why I wonder are colors needed to display a menu?
>
> That I don't know.

Vim needs a way to visually indicate that the menu is a menu, and it
doesn't do so by drawing a box (I assume that's due to
historically-limited screen space and/or differences in box-drawing
between terminals). Also, Vim indicates which item is currently
selected through color. So, the way Vim does it (without the box), you
need at a very minimum 3 colors:

+-----------------+
Normal Text|_________________|
|Selected popup |
|Nonselected popup|
+-----------------+

Most terminals that support 3 colors support the standard(ish) ANSI 8/16
colors¹ (8 or 16 depending on whether 'bright' is bright). So, minimum
8.

Maybe it would be good to change Vim to fallback to a "blocky" menu
mechanism. More likely, it's not worth the effort, since terminals
usually support at least 8 colors.

--
Best,
Ben

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors

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