Re: Exposing Isearch toggleable options

[Oleh Krehel]

Kaushal Modi <address@hidden> writes:

> Let's say, these are the acronyms: 
>
> Cs - Case sensitive 
> RE - Regular expressions 
> ČF - Char folding 
> LW - Lax Whitespace 
> ... And so on. 
>
> This list of 2-char acronyms can again be made user customizable. But the 
> association of acronyms to the toggle var
> should be kept fixed to prevent confusion and unneeded complication. 
>
> Those acronyms will be displayed with sort of a dimmed out, gray face when 
> the respective toggle is disabled. But the
> face will be changed to something like bold green when enabled. It goes 
> without saying that the faces would be
> customizable. 
>
> What do you guys think?

I can only say that I couldn't manage to remember what each of "U:---"
does in 5 years of using Emacs. It's possible to check what they do only
by hovering the mouse or reading the manual.  Then I switched to
powerline, which only uses one position of the 5:

    - for a normal buffer
    * for a modified buffer
    % for a read-only buffer

Of course, it's just one personal preference. Some people instead like
to have a lot of info in the mode line, they even put the clock and CPU
load there.

I think having the illusion of simplicity is important: select the
simplest looking thing and go with it, and allow the user to make it
complex if she wants. That's the way a lot of the successful editors
work (except the option to make it complex, which is an advantage of
Emacs).

On the other hand, most users learn basic Elisp because they want to
hide the unnecessary tool bars, menu bars, and scroll bars, startup
messages etc, all of which are on by default.