Highlighting inside of new parenthesis blocks highlighting of selection

[rpls]

When creating a parenthesis with smartparens, the insides will be highlighted until the cursor exits. This highlighting overlays the selection face background. See example below (made in c-mode, but other modes have this problem as well).

The corresponding face is sp-pair-overlay-face. Is there a way to fix this? Or is this intentional?

[nashamri]

Thanks @rpls for reporting this. This needs fixing, and not intentional. I'll try to fix this later today, hopefully :smile:

[rpls]

Nice, thanks. But this is a weird issue. When I change the face, e.g. by setting a lighter background color, the issue doesn't go away. If I clear all the face settings, the issue still doesn't go away. And pretty much all the themes I tested have this problem. This might have something to do with how smartparens highlights this. But maybe there is a special face setup which works correctly...

[nashamri]

It could be something in smartparens or it could be the way emacs merges multiple faces. I need to investigate this to see what's going on here :smile:

[nashamri]

@rpls Just messed a little bit with it and it looks like there's some sort of conflict between sp-pair-overlay-face and the region face. When you select something emacs applies the region face to the selected region. And sp-pair-overlay-face takes precedence and applies its background instead of the region's background. So this issue might be resolvable upstream in the smartparens mode.

I encountered many cases where I wanted to control which face should be applied when something like this is happening, but couldn't find a good solution.

Here's the a reference for how emacs deals with conflicting faces: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Displaying-Faces.html

[nashamri]

@rpls This issues seems outside the scope of the theme. I've tested many famous themes and they all exhibit the same issue. So it could be a smartparen issue and need to be reported upstream. https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

[rpls]

Thanks for looking into it. I couldn't find any related issue in their tracker, so I opened one.

[Fuco1]

I don't understand the issue here. This is a feature of smartparens to highlight "active" blocks, you can disable it if you don't want that, there's a setting for it.

What exactly should I fix?

[rpls]

@Fuco1 The highlighting of the active codeblock blocks the highlighting of a selection. E.g. if i'm still in an active block and select something, all visual feedback concerning the selection/region is not visible. See for example the screen shot in the initial issue the word "Something" is selected, but this isn't visible at all. I don't know enough about faces in emacs, but as @nashamri describes it, sp-pair-overlay-face takes precedence over the normal region face. So I guess a fix could be to let region take precesence over sp-pair-overlay-face?

[Fuco1]

Well that's not possible. Overlays take precedence.

What is weird is that you see the SP highlight even when you do action other than insertion. Probably some misconfiguration somewhere.

[rpls]

Maybe it's a weird side effect of evil?

[nashamri]

Maybe this info will help.

I've noticed that the solarized-light theme does show the selected lines differently.

However, when I do list-faces-display and look for the faces that smartparens use, I don't see that bold face. It might not be even an issue with smartparens.

[nashamri]

Highlighting within a block works well now on spacemacs since this commit https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/commit/653da2a.

Maybe this issue https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens/issues/547 could be resolved by doing something similar.