Re: Proportional fonts in the mode line (one month test)

[Po Lu]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I've now switched master over to defaulting to proportional fonts in the
> mode line.  Customise the `mode-line' face to get the old look back.

There must be a better way to achieve this than modifying the
`mode-line' face.  We could probably set the face separately for
individual parts of `mode-line-format'.

Many external packages depend on a fixed pitch `mode-line' face.  It
would be good to not change this default.

> I've made the most obvious things that change size -- the U:-- thing,
> the top/bot, and the line/col thing -- use the `min-width' spec, so
> things should jump around (for those that care about that).

Also, please don't change the header line as well.  For instance, the
header line in calc that reads "---- Emacs Calculator Mode ----" is now
totally broken.

There are also packages that override mode-line-format entirely, such as
2C, and they now look bad.

> There's probably more things that should be handled that way, but we'll
> take that as we go along.

> This is just a test: If everybody hates this default, we won't
> proceed,

This wording is shocking!  Does it mean that we will proceed with this
default if even one person likes it?

> but we won't know unless we test it.  So we're now testing this on the
> trunk for a month.

I don't think we should make master a place for treating users as guinea
pigs, especially when the change cannot be easily reverted (how do I get
rid of the new `min-width' properties in mode-line-format).

> Vote in a month.

This should be posted to info-gnu-emacs.  Not everyone who uses Emacs
follows Emacs development, and any kind of vote posted only to
emacs-devel is likely going to come out skewed.

Thanks.