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Re: NeXTStep port preferences
From: |
Benjamin Riefenstahl |
Subject: |
Re: NeXTStep port preferences |
Date: |
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:18:59 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.98 (darwin) |
Hi David, Adrian,
I have been trying to work with that dialog some and have been mostly
frustrated. Some thoughts:
- Quick access to the options for default font and modifier keys are
usefull for first installation and probably for newbies.
- The options to change the cursor are probably not important enough
to have here. [If I understand this right, there are new NextStep
specific cursor drawing routines in the port. This is not good, I
think. If the portable cursor routines are deficient they should be
updated for all platforms. I may be missing something here.]
- That the dialog stores its stuff in the defaults database is a good
feature, because defaults are read before ".emacs" and so this is a
good place for the font setting.
- I am missing the "Emacs.geometry" option in the defaults database.
For me "Emacs.font" and "Emacs.geometry" are the two options that I
need in the defaults database, everything else is better in
".emacs".
- The font setting mechanism doesn't work unless an Emacs frame is
selected. This used to be documented in the readme, but it is still
a bug.
- The callbacks that the Cocoa dialogs call are not protected in a
catch block. If they run into an error, Emacs aborts without a
visible error message.
I think that the "Preferences..." menu should start a customization
buffer, like it does in the Carbon port. This can start with the root
of the customize hierarchy or it can be a "New Installation" group
with the most important options, if somebody wants to create such a
group. If customize does not support having buttons to show the font
and color dialogs, that can be added to customize.
Adrian Robert writes:
> It is also not something easy to maintain outside of GNU Emacs
> itself (e.g. in a distribution like Aquamacs)
It is not easy to be maintained anywhere. As you notice, it is broken
even now, and only part of that is bit-rot.
> However, some concessions to platform convention and user
> convenience ought to be tolerated on a case-bycase basis depending
> on the user-benefit to obtrusiveness ratio.
I don't think that a buggy and old-fashioned looking dialog (IMO) is
really an asset for anybody, certainly not Mac users.
> Otherwise, at least in this case, there's no real reason not to just
> use the X11 version on OS X
The inconvenience of having to start X11 to edit files or to read mail
and probably missing features (e.g. does DnD work from Finder to
Emacs?).
benny