Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[joakim]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 02:18:03 +0000
>> From: Artur Malabarba <address@hidden>
>> Cc: emacs-devel <address@hidden>
>> 
>> > > I could be wrong, but I think you just defined all users. In the
>> > > Unicode standard used by Emacs, there are 5721 characters with a
>> > > “decomposition” property. Is there a user who is well-equiped to type
>> > > all of those characters?
>> > 
>> > (And how many of those 5721 characters can be matched from a latin
>> > letter?)
>> 
>> OK, I see what you meant.
>
> You do?  I don't, because the answer to Óscar's question is: 376 if we
> count only canonical decompositions (which we must support, or users
> will hate us), and a whopping 1449 if we count compatibility
> decompositions as well.  That's quite a few, I'd say, although AFAIR
> we don't find all of the compatibility decompositions under character
> folding, only some.
>
> Btw, from my POV, the ease of searching for characters not on my
> keyboard is not the main point of this feature.  The main feature is
> to search for similar characters.  (Of course, I don't mind if someone
> likes this for other reasons.)
>
>> Although currently Emacs does fold all decompositions by default, this is 
>> just temporary. We've said we would turn that off before release (and in 
>> fact I'll do that tomorrow (and ammend my post too)).
>
> We didn't say we will turn it off, we said we will _decide_ whether to
> turn it off.  So please don't turn it off just yet, we are still
> collecting feedback.  If anything, for now I counted more people who
> said they liked it than those who didn't (5 vs 9, by my count).  I'm
> not saying we should already decide to leave it on, but turning it off
> is certainly premature.  Less than two weeks have passed since the
> pretest began, there's no rush.

I like character folding, I write mainly in Swedish and English.

The mix of Swedish and English usually winds up being horrible, so
character folding helps finding things in source code where you are not sure if
Swedish characters have been guillotined or not (ÅÄÖ becomes AAO)

That said I think the question if something should be default or not
generates way too much warm air. I think ELPA should carry a number of
installable themes that present a coherent set of defaults.

So you could just install 'emacs-xtra-everything' from ELPA and get many
interesting features suitable for a fast machine. Or you could go with
'emacs-orthodoxy' which disables certain new settings.

(like for instance 'C-x M-o runs the command dired-omit-mode'. I didn't
like the newfangled C-x prefix. Otherwise I'm mostly positive to
newfangledness)


> Thanks.
>

-- 
Joakim Verona