Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 16/04/2020 01.28, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
>> Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 22:30:20 -0400
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>>
>> Another question about them: are they among the segment of users for
>> whom the investment of learning Emacs would pay off?
> 
> I don't really know the answer, but I'd like to remind all of us that
> there's a lot of "propaganda" out there telling everyone to turn off
> GUI features such as the menu bar and the tool bar.  The network is
> full of personal init files that "proudly" do that, and forums like
> Reddit are full of such advice to every newbie who asks about
> configuring their Emacs.  It is hard to be enthusiastic about making
> these features more modern when the community seems to be divided on
> whether they should at all be present.  IMO, we should first get our
> act together and decide whether these features are important, and then
> speak up according to those decisions when we see advice to the
> contrary.

That's a great point.  My personal config has the tool bar turned off.  Part of 
the reason is that with my desktop configuration (using a dark theme) the icons 
are unreadable (dark grey on a dark background, see attached screenshot), and 
part of the reason is that I didn't like the look of the icons in some of the 
(few) modes that use the tool-bar (e.g. in message-mode).  (Also, I seem to 
have a bug with the tool-bar: when I hover over the first two buttons it 
doesn't show a tooltip, but if I click on of them and close the file-selection 
dialog before hovering over the button again I do see a tooltip).

On the other hand, I have written some modes that override the user 
configuration and re-enable to tool-bar with mode-specific functions, and I 
haven't received complaints (see e.g. the attached screenshots).

Clément.

emacs-Q.png
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fstar-toolbar.png
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