Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Per Abrahamsen]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> I think that's not the best solution for this problem, since there's
> already enough information to make such a connection automatically in
> the great majority of cases.

There are no conflict in doing both.  Create automatic links when
possible, and additional manual links when not.

>> A more controversial solution would be to 
>> 
>>   (defalias 'describe-variable 'customize-variable)
>
> Yes; that would be very bad.
>
> Customization buffers are filled with all sorts of crap that's
> completely unnecessary when you just want to see a quick description of
> a variable (which is about 99% of the time for me), which would distract
> greatly from the actual documentation (not to mention ballooning the
> size of help buffers to something absurd).

Then make describe-variable a function that called customize-variable
with a 'terse argument.  Or bind a 'customize-terse' dynamic variable.

Most of the new cross-referencing functionality in Emacs 21 was
already part of the doc string widget used by customize.  I think
duplicating the code just lead to inconsistencies and wasted effort.