Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 20:06:08 +0300
> 
> On 22.04.2020 19:55, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > And the icons look the same, no matter what distribution are we
> > talking about?  Doesn't something depend also on the desktop that's in
> > use, and perhaps also on the window manager?
> 
> No, the icons looks different across themes. Hence the whole notion of 
> "icon themes". But the set of icon names is fairly stable. This is what 
> we'd be relying on.

But a given theme is not available universally, not even with the same
toolkit, I guess?

> > I'm not sure I like this direction.  It sounds like the opposite of
> > having an Emacs that looks more or less the same on all major
> > platforms.
> 
> Right. It's already not the case.

Which is already bad, IMO.  But before we make this a rule rather than
an exception or a historical accident, we should think hard whether we
really want that.  Emacs is special in several ways, and one of them
is its commonality -- you have only ever learn Emacs once, on one
platform.  It's  why I can give advice on Reddit to people that use
platforms I never did.

So this will be a significant change in direction, at least in my
eyes, and the decision should not be made casually, let alone by
default.

> > E.g., you buy the Emacs manual printed a year
> > or 2 ago, but the icons it shows are all different from what's on
> > display.  I don't even understand how will we be able to show the
> > icons in our Info manual, if the images don't come with Emacs and are
> > different on each platform/build.
> 
> The window looks are different between platforms anyway.

No, not really.  They are extremely similar, actually, modulo a few
unimportant bells and whistles.  At least the parts that are relevant
to Emacs are almost identical.

> On GTK, we're already there. Since 22.2, apparently. Only we haven't 
> been paying attention to keeping this feature in proper maintenance.

I'm asking people to think whether we _want_ that.  That we are one
leg there doesn't yet mean we decided to do that consciously.  You are
suggesting to make that a policy, and that's a serious decision, IMO.