Re: Custom themes

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I don't remember the details, but it is a matter of defining
   a collection of custom settings and giving them a name.
   Then you can enable them and disable them by name.

I have the impression nobody knows the details, or would be able to
document them, except a very few people who probably do not read Emacs
Devel regularly.  I guess Per may know some of the details.  The first
question seems to be whether Custom themes are currently a correctly
working and fully developed feature that people might be able to use
if they knew how, or whether it is unfinished work in progress, not
really ready to be used or documented.  Is it really ready do be
documented in the manuals at this stage, assuming somebody would be
willing and able to do it?

I believe that in as far as usage goes, Custom themes are nowhere
used, definitely not in the Emacs source tree and probably not
elsewhere either, except for the `user' and `standard' internal
themes.  People want to use themes but when they look at the current
implementation and its documentation (or better, lack thereof) they
have no idea of how to use it, assuming it can be used at all (at present).

There appears to be a widely used, popular and well documented
alternative, color-theme.el.  Its problem is that it does not interact
very well with Custom: it creates "rogue" variables.

I could at least partially alleviate the worst parts of the problems
with cus-theme.el I pointed out, as long as I would know what is an
appropriate default directory for theme files.  A new customizable
variable custom-theme-directory with default the user's home directory?

Sincerely,

Luc.