Re: kill ring menu

[Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org>]

Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:

> And finally, this is a situation where we have a user-interface win
> (consistency of interface to enabling/disabling fontification) over
> resource consumption (loading of font-lock.el).  I think that as a
> general principle, the former should win over the latter. 

I agree with Colin.  The user interface should improve, and
"improvement" translates to "easy to explain" and "easy to use" and
"flexible if needed" -- IMHO, of course.  Colin's idea of enabling or
disabling all of font-lock in one go, and even enabling font-lock by
default is the right way to go: Easier to explain to newbies, easy to
use for newbies, flexible for oldbies.  The explanation is: M-x
font-lock toggles fontification as a whole.  Font-lock is just one
part of it.

Perhaps we should rephrase the proposal as follows: M-x
toggle-global-fontification will toggle all fontifications, including
font-lock.

In fact the only people suffering will be oldbies that have font-lock
switched off and still like fontification in some buffers (people such
as Richard, apparently).  My personal experience in supporting newbies
is that all want to switch font-lock on.  Those that did not do this,
usually worked on the console, so they did not benefit from fontified
some buffers.

I think the group of people suffering due to Colin's change is small,
and it knows elisp, so they will be able to customize Emacs to do
their bidding.  Thus the damage is small, and the benefit is big.  I
think the user interface to fontification should be simplified.

Alex.
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