Emacs User Friendliness Question/Hope

[Jeff Clough]

Right now there seems to be quite a lot of movement for Emacs to "work
like every other application".  There are a number of features and fixes
in the works to accomplish various things to that end.  But can it be
done in such a way as to minimize the amount of work people have to do
to avoid these enhancements?

Can we get a variable like "enable-compatibility-mode" or some such,
that when 't' (the default) gives us the new and friendly Emacs and when
'nil' gives us the Emacs that works how it does today?

Explanation:

As it stands now, there are a number of things I turn off in Emacs (such
as the menu bar and toolbar) and a number of things that I don't enable
that might soon become defaults (like delete-selection-mode).  I know
I'm not the only one that personally finds these features either of no
use, or even annoying at times.

With Emacs 23.x, this takes only a few lines in my .emacs file.  As the
amount of "user friendliness" goes up, the lines in my .emacs will
likely also go up (the change to how kill/yank interacts with the
clipboard is an example).

Making Emacs work like every other application may be fine, and this
isn't a plea for doing otherwise, but *I* at least wish every other
application worked like Emacs.  Please don't make it harder for people
like me to keep things working for them the way they are now.

Jeff