Re: NeXTStep port preferences

[Benjamin Riefenstahl]

Hi David, Adrian,


I have been trying to work with that dialog some and have been mostly
frustrated.   Some thoughts:

- Quick access to the options for default font and modifier keys are
  usefull for first installation and probably for newbies.

- The options to change the cursor are probably not important enough
  to have here.  [If I understand this right, there are new NextStep
  specific cursor drawing routines in the port.  This is not good, I
  think.  If the portable cursor routines are deficient they should be
  updated for all platforms.  I may be missing something here.]

- That the dialog stores its stuff in the defaults database is a good
  feature, because defaults are read before ".emacs" and so this is a
  good place for the font setting.

- I am missing the "Emacs.geometry" option in the defaults database.
  For me "Emacs.font" and "Emacs.geometry" are the two options that I
  need in the defaults database, everything else is better in
  ".emacs".

- The font setting mechanism doesn't work unless an Emacs frame is
  selected.  This used to be documented in the readme, but it is still
  a bug.

- The callbacks that the Cocoa dialogs call are not protected in a
  catch block.  If they run into an error, Emacs aborts without a
  visible error message.

I think that the "Preferences..." menu should start a customization
buffer, like it does in the Carbon port.  This can start with the root
of the customize hierarchy or it can be a "New Installation" group
with the most important options, if somebody wants to create such a
group.  If customize does not support having buttons to show the font
and color dialogs, that can be added to customize.


Adrian Robert writes:
> It is also not something easy to maintain outside of GNU Emacs
> itself (e.g. in a distribution like Aquamacs)

It is not easy to be maintained anywhere.  As you notice, it is broken
even now, and only part of that is bit-rot.

> However, some concessions to platform convention and user
> convenience ought to be tolerated on a case-bycase basis depending
> on the user-benefit to obtrusiveness ratio.

I don't think that a buggy and old-fashioned looking dialog (IMO) is
really an asset for anybody, certainly not Mac users.

> Otherwise, at least in this case, there's no real reason not to just
> use the X11 version on OS X

The inconvenience of having to start X11 to edit files or to read mail
and probably missing features (e.g. does DnD work from Finder to
Emacs?).


benny