Re: IDE

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: adatgyujto@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2015 13:10:10 +0300
> 
> On 10/10/2015 05:25 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > It's standard software engineering practice, why should you ask for
> > its justification?
> 
> I'm asking for details. Again, to further the discussion.

I don't understand what details you expect me to produce.

> "Let's unify features X, Y and Z" is not necessarily the standard 
> practice.

I didn't say anything even close.  I did suggest to _decide_ which
features we'd like to be in an Emacs IDE.

> I've also given a few general reasons why a "big design" might be 
> suboptimal

High-level design is not "big design".  Quite the contrary: it
generally leaves out all of the details, and documents only the main
design decisions.  Like which features will be included and which
definitely excluded, whether "fixed-window" appearance should be part
of it or not, etc.  You can call this "guidelines" if "design" sounds
too much.  Developers will benefit from such guidelines because they
will know what to expect and how to design their components.

This is all standard SE practice.

> the result is likely to turn out to be less flexible

A good tool strikes a fine balance between "flexible enough" and "too
flexible".  The latter more often than not means the tool is complex
and hard to set up.

> a significant number of users might prefer to use only some of the
> parts.

That's OK, and I see no problem with that.

> > The other IDEs use something similar to a tooltip, or a drop-down menu
> > with different fonts and colors.
> 
> You can already customize colors and fonts user for the Company popup. 
> But if you end up using fonts with different dimensions, of course, that 
> would result in jagged display.

Right.  Which is why tooltips or pop-up menus are better: they don't
suffer from these problems.

> From trying it out, I have the following complaints about x-show-tip
> capabilities:
> 
> - It's background rendering is inconsistent. As an example, the first 
> time I evaluate (tooltip-show "abc") in an Emacs session, the background 
> is yellow-ish. The next time, and after that, the background is black.

This could be the result of the recent changes by Ken, to make
tooltips less "voracious", to use Martin's term.  Trying in an older
Emacs will tell.

FWIW, I don't see anything like that here (on MS-Windows).

> - Is there a way to show several tooltips at once? To display different 
> elements of the completion UI side by side.

No, you need to lump them all together, or use menus.

> - If a tooltip is displayed, and I Alt-Tab to another program's window, 
> the tooltip remains on top. This is by far the most annoying one.

Martin told you how to solve this, I think.