Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Po Lu]

조성빈 <address@hidden> writes:


> Then you can turn on ‘vanilla-mode’ on your init.el and call it a day.
> ‘vanilla-mode’ will be the current situation of Emacs - it will try to
> be stable.

Experience shows that major changes are not as easy to revert as a
single `(vanilla-mode 1)'.

> Why? If you’re fine with the current level of changes in Emacs, that would
> be the level of changes in ‘vanilla-mode’.

What do you mean?  I haven't seen the default binding for `C-v` changed
in about 25 years.  It would be a shame if it changed now.

> I’m saying that one can add a variable like ‘expected-emacs-version’ and
> when Emacs is loading init.el and ‘expected-emacs-version’ is different
> from the current version, Emacs can warn you.

That assumes the person with the config puts that variable in, and
anyway it makes for more maintenance burden.


> No, it doesn’t. Better defaults help users and allow them to lighten their
> configuration.

There is no "better default".  There's only the default that remains
stable and so far happens to work for everyone.

> The balance I’m suggesting (actually ndame) is to add a ‘vanilla-mode’ for
> people who value stability over features.

You can't stuff major changes in a `vanilla-mode'.

> No, it doesn’t - see previous comments.

Yes it does.  I can't be bothered to put an extra line in my .emacs for
every tiny change users decide they want.