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Re: theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired)
From: |
David Reitter |
Subject: |
Re: theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired) |
Date: |
Thu, 7 Jul 2005 13:22:05 +0100 |
On 7 Jul 2005, at 11:53, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:
Historically, the Emacs community has provided default behavior
that catered to its entrenched userbase. The answer to nearly
any suggestion that such behavior might be awkward / unfamiliar /
jarring to new users, especially those on platforms held in low
regard by the entrenched userbase, is that Emacs is customizable.
Essentially a "Let them eat cake" attitude.
One possibility to address this is to develop 'distributions'. Just
like, say, SUSE Linux offers a GNU/Linux OS with a whole lot of
customization and integration, you can distribute Emacs with such
customizations. That's what I am doing with Aquamacs Emacs, where we
can radically change the behavior in order to make it consistent with
GUI based operating systems.
My notion of a theme is not a named collection of configuration
settings. Rather it is an expression of high-level intent:
- as much as possible behave like Window / MacOS / *nix
- underline clickable links
- give me single frame behavior vs something like Drew's OneOnOne
Well, these would be examples of what I would understand as 'themes'.
I have implemented the single frame behavior (it takes more than
OneonOne to do that), for example.
And if I understand correctly what themes are supposed to do, I
cannot but agree with you that the currently planned collections of
customization settings won't do the job for efforts to change the
user interface (point 2 below). Themes make some headway though
(point 1):
1. Aquamacs changes a lot of default customization settings, and it
also ensures that the user's actual customizations are noted as such
and saved - by setting the 'standard-value property whenever a
customization variable is set. That way we ensure that the user can
still customize whatever - it's just the defaults that are changed. A
lot of hooks are used, but they could be handled as customization
variables.
Making this process a bit easier, making it easier for the user to
undo some of these new 'defaults' by defining groups of
customizations in themes would certainly be desirable.
2. However, over the last two or three months or so, Aquamacs has
come to do much more than that. It blatantly redefines and advises
functions, something which can only be undone by means of extra
customization variables that are checked by the new functions. In
addition to that, we patch the c core and one or two of the .el files
in order to either implement needed additional functionality or (on
the Carbon port side) to modify functionality. In addition to that,
several support files in the original package are modified, others
added (converted manuals). [I make an effort to contribute changes,
in particular bugfixes, where I see fit - it's not a competing fork.]
CONCLUSION:
We cannot realize your points with collections of customization
settings. The changes are much more profound.
Therefore, there is another consideration that becomes more important:
Makers of a distribution like Aquamacs would really need a stable,
relatively bug-free release. We're shooting at a moving target
otherwise.
- Sorting of directories in dired, Lennart Borgman, 2005/07/06
- Re: Sorting of directories in dired, Juanma Barranquero, 2005/07/06
- Re: theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired), David Reitter, 2005/07/07
- Re: theming, David Kastrup, 2005/07/08
- Re: theming, David Reitter, 2005/07/08
- Re: theming, Stefan Monnier, 2005/07/08
- Re: theming, Richard M. Stallman, 2005/07/08
- Re: theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired), Richard M. Stallman, 2005/07/10
- Re: theming, Lennart Borgman, 2005/07/07
- Re: theming, Juanma Barranquero, 2005/07/07
- Re: theming, Lennart Borgman, 2005/07/07