Re: Some developement questions

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2018 15:26:25 +0700
> Cc: Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>, Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > An image of a floppy disk is generally used for saving something to
> > disk
> 
> I thought about it when choosing the character. The save icon uses the
> 3.5″ floppy disk (when it depicts a floppy disk at all), so I took the
> 5.25″ one to avoid ambiguity.

I doubt if this subtlety will help, but that's me.

> > so I think it would be better to use it for the "modified"
> > marker, perhaps even with mouse click on it invoking save-buffer.
> 
> Well, most other editors use either an asterisk or a bullet. I didn’t
> feel like inventing a new symbol usage for its own sake.

So what is wrong with the asterisk we already have?

> What does clicking the * do now? Just drop the “buffer modified” flag?

Yes.

> > As for using these images for EOL format, I guess their mnemonic
> > significance is something to your personal experience, because I would
> > not have guessed why a floppy means DOS/Windows, what with GNU/Linux
> > nowadays being ubiquitous on small devices and PCs.  I don't see any
> > emoticons that strike me as appropriate, but perhaps we could design
> > small icons of our own instead.
> 
> Well, DOS stands for Disk Operating System, so the DOS line end
> convention gets a disk icon.

IME, rationalizations don't usually help with mnemonics.  If you need
to explain the mnemonic, you already lost.  The only non-trivial
mnemonics that are OK are those which are widely used by other apps.

> Point is, U:--- is a cryptic indicator that basically says “everything
> is as you expect”, and 1\%*@ is a cryptic indicator that says “there
> are so many things wrong, unusual or unsafe about this buffer”. These
> are all important status items that could be made more informative
> when in their abnormal, unsafe or attention-required state; or,
> conversely, quieted down to silence when in the usual, safe and
> expected state.

Personally, I disagree that they are "important".  I think they are of
secondary importance, as long as Emacs does what the users expect with
the respective features.  It is only when Emacs misbehaves that these
become more important, but I think problems with these particular ones
are well in the past.

So I think we shouldn't over-engineer this.  Using icons or emoji for
some of them is OK if it makes the indicators speak for themselves,
but we shouldn't IMO get out of our way to provide icons at any cost.