On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 12:27 PM Eli Zaretskii <
address@hidden> wrote:
> I think it is a good idea. Today, OpenType fonts are standard on all
> major platforms;
That's not exactly why I asked whether it's a good idea. I'm asking
whether it's a good idea to use characters as if they were small
images. That is not what fonts were designed for, and that is
definitely not what font-selection code in Emacs was designed for.
I know that you don't like the idea of using fonts for icons and emoji inside emacs. I would ask you to reconsider, for two (and a half) reasons:
1.) This support us ubiquitous in the "modern" toolchains used by new developers, especially in ubiquitous real-time chat systems, internet fora, and the like. Anecdotally, I know emacs' lack of support for emoji (with the additional refinement of support being added to and then removed from emacs under macOS) has caused multiple smart coders to abandon emacs very quickly.
2.) The all-the-icons package was created to consolidate multiple packages that were installing these fonts for their own uses, especially packages that update the mode line and the various file browsers (which is why all-the-icons uses those screenshots specifically), and also MUA code. Put another way, people are very likely to use some of these fonts inside emacs anyway. The difference is in how much effort it takes -- whether they see it mostly in packages like Spacemacs, Doom, and mu4e, or in "plain emacs".
2.5) These fonts are very popular amongst developers who use "fancy prompt" packages for their shell, so that their prompt includes things like git status, python/docker/ruby/etc env markers, battery indicators, and similar. These features are pretty young (compared to most of us, anyway), but are nigh-ubiquitous among newer developers I've seen; the features are both built into many new shells and have spawned a surprisingly large variety of "cool prompt" packages for a wide variety of shells (including several for bash). I mention this as evidence that installing fonts is not at all a high bar for most developers.
Anyway, I th9ink you understand by now that I dislike this idea, and
prefer to use image files. Let's leave the characters and their
glyphs for what they were intended: text.
I fear/believe that the foals of those horses have already built themselves new multicolored, ideogram-based barns out in the world. :-)
~Chad
P.S. ...and now I notice that this is pretty much the only communication medium I regularly use that doesn't automatically convert that smiley into an emoji... ...because I choose to have it off for this mailing list.