Re: Should this package be included into the NS port?

[George Plymale II]

[I had to resend this message because my attached screencast was too big to be
accepted onto the mailing list. I apologize if this creates duplicate entries in
your inboxes.]


Nick Helm <address@hidden> writes:

> Sorry, I didn't explain it very well. No, the help book topics should be
> there. I'm talking about the menu items – everything from 'Send Emacs
> Feedback to Apple' and below.  
>
> As I understand it, macOS tries to hide these menu items when the help
> search field is populated and only shows them again when the field
> becomes empty. But on Emacs they can get added back in when the menu-bar
> updates.

Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. It's funny that you mention all of this
because I actually noticed right after posting my screenshot, that my screenshot
is kind of misleading. And I didn't even know it was misleading until playing
around with Help a bit more. Now I understand what was going on, thanks to your
remarks. But I think it behooves me to post what the actual precise behavior was
since you've discussed what caused it.

The menu items from 'Send Emacs Feedback to Apple' and below actually only
appear after removing focus from Help and when the search field is empty, as you
say. I.e., the Mac Port seems to actually kind of get it right but not 100% of
the time (contrary to what is suggested by my earlier screenshot). Here's a
screencast to show precisely what happens with the Help menu on the Mac Port
(since a screenshot seems insufficient for this):
https://cl.ly/2L2p0J0k053n/Help%20menu%20weirdness.mp4

As a bit of an aside, the Mac Port seems to get a bit screwed up when you try to
do certain things while the Help search field is not empty. For example:

- While trying to record this screencast, I got Emacs to hang when I clicked
Help (and the search field was not empty).
- I also got it to hang in another session by having something in the search
field and typing "/scp:" in `find-file' (doing a completely unrelated task).
- Furthermore, I got it to crash by repeatedly clicking Help when an item was in
the search field (you can see that mentioned in the screencast itself).

Strange stuff, but I guess you're right -- the Mac Port is not perfect in this
area.

I guess that the takeaway here is that Emacs is just all-around weird on
macOS. If we really want to get to the root of some of these problems, it would
probably be ideal to combine work from both the NS port and the Mac Port and see
if we can't somehow get Emacs to behave more like a regular Mac app
internally. I know that Alan and I already discussed earlier in the thread why
this may not be possible (and may not even be accepted by RMS since he has
previously expressed rejection of any Emacs features on OS X which are not also
present on Linux [and there may even be licensing concerns, but I'm not sure
about this]), but this really does seem to be the ideal solution. Having a Mac
Port and an NS port seems kind of silly esp. when we're dealing with issues like
this where we would greatly benefit from unity, not fragmentation and dealing
with the problem(s) separately. Once again, just my 2¢

Thanks,
- George Plymale II