Re: Customize may not be appropriate for older users

[David Kastrup]

pot@gnu.org (Francesco Potorti`) writes:

> David.Kastrup@t-online.de (David Kastrup) writes:
>    All of the customize stuff gets collected into a single section of
>    .emacs.
>    
> Yes, I observed that, but nonetheless I feel nervous when *any*
> automatic tool edits one of my hand made files[*].
> 
> I'd better have it write somewhere else, and do myself the changes to
> emacs.
> 
> Suggestions, which could be taken together, or separately, or just be
> starting points:
> 
> - Customise should ask before writing to .emacs.  The easy answer should
>   be yes, if the answer is no it should offer to either write somewhere
>   else, or to show in a buffer what code it produced, or to pop up the
>   file edited and changed, but not yet saved for you to edit (with the
>   changes highlighted).
> 
> - Customise should write not to .emacs, but to .emacs.d/customise.el,
>   and check that .emacs contains a line like "(load.*customise.el".
> 
> 
> [*] when a program dares to edit a file that I wrote, I say that it
>    "messes" with my file

Sorry, but your paranoia is hardly a good reason to confuse the heck
out of people that just want to customize things as presented by
Emacs' menus.

See other answers in this thread for perfectly easy solutions of
having Emacs write customizations to a different file if you think it
incapable of maintaining its own section in .emacs.

Things would be different if you could point out anything in
customize's default behaviour that may lead to problems.  Until you
do, complicating the user interface to making customizations to Emacs
is hardly a good idea.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de