Highlight commands in descriptions

[xsebek]

I want the commands in descriptions (entities, goal) to be highlighted instead of surrounded with ticks.

For shorter descriptions, it does not matter, but with longer ones like the goal or grabber device, I find it hard to read.

This would also be a good opportunity to use backticks to disambiguate them from normal ticks that English uses and be compatible with Markdown syntax.

As a small code refactoring, we could call the attribute "highlight" instead of using the robot attribute. 😅

update, 15 May 23: Collecting some related links here for easy access: #309, #574, jtdaugherty/brick#400, #1106

[byorgey]

Related: #309 .

[xsebek]

Just to be clear about the higlight attribute, there is a highlightAttr that means cyan foreground and robotAttr that means bold white foreground, which is used as bold for some table headers. I think it is funny, but not very readable. 😅

[byorgey]

Yeah, we should add a new bold attribute or something. Agree we should not use robot attribute for so many things!

[byorgey]

Note, the difficulty with applying attributes to things in descriptions is that we have to give text to a function that does the text wrapping and constructs a widget. So we have no opportunity to apply formatting to individual words. This might require some kind of upstream PR to brick to give us the functionality we need.

[xsebek]

Well at least the triple backtick examples should be doable with separate widgets.

I wonder if we could compose widgets so that they would still look like text and create our markdownTxt function to do it where relevant. That might be useful enough to publish as an open-source library. 😄

[byorgey]

Well at least the triple backtick examples should be doable with separate widgets.

Maybe? I am not 100% sure how easy that will be.

I wonder if we could compose widgets so that they would still look like text and create our markdownTxt function to do it where relevant.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

[xsebek]

I thought we could layout parts of the text to look like one text.

But looking at str it might be necessary to create a custom rendering function for the widget - some bit more complicated version of Text -> Image. But we should look through the brick projects if someone did not figure this out already. 🤔

[xsebek]

I split out the easier part for highlighting code blocks.

As a prerequisite, we should change the inline code to use backticks, so that we can at least find it and get markdown support for free. AFAIK we only use it for valid swarm commands, but in case we wanted to support more languages, Pandoc has an Extension: inline_code_attributes that looks like this:

Try typing `build {}`{.swarm} - ...

[byorgey]

I think at this point most (all?) of the inline code in entity descriptions, tutorial goal text, etc. has been converted to use backticks.

[xsebek]

@byorgey thanks for updating on this. 👍

Next up, we need new data structure to represent text that has parts of it code.

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After that we have to wrap that type by lines (not widgets). Once we have lines those can be turned into widgets.

Or we wait a little while until brick/other library makes the wrapping and assigning attributes easier for us.

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This is mostly a TLDR of the discussion in jtdaugherty/brick#400.