Re: GUI X-FreeDesktop integration

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 12:16 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> I suggest to do this the other way around: make this new behavior
> optional, until we are sure people expect that.
> [...] We shouldn't bend our thinking
> like that, just because we see some trend in other applications and
> think we can easily follow it with something similar.
>

Sure, the conservative approach works here also. What I was suggesting was
basically "let's give the distros both options and ask/see which they
pick". Since we're generally sensitive to changing defaults on releases, I
think there are ways to ask before releasing, but the data collection is
likely to be sparse.


>
> > Since you asked for opinions.... I suspect the issue is relatively
> niche. Several years ago, when I was heavily
> > involved in supporting a large user base (MIT students, faculty, and
> staff), the fact that clicking the
> > launcher-app multiple times got multiple separate emacsen was considered
> a bug that got reported relatively
> > frequently. The people who wanted multiple isolated emacsen were after
> very specific outcomes, knew how
> > to get there, and (for the vast majority) weren't using the gui launcher
> to get there. My instinct is that many
> > people are in that same situation today, but I might be wrong about that.
>
> Then please explain to me why the time it takes Emacs to start is
> still such a hot topic, on Redit, help-gnu-emacs and elsewhere.  That
> clearly indicates that people do start Emacs many times, instead of
> having a single long-running session.
>

Speaking to my past experience: people would end up with multiple emacsen
running, and if they ever noticed that fact, it was the opposite of what
they wanted. Lack of shared state like confusing history and accidentally
using old code because of unsaved changes in a separate emacs were common
complaints, performance concerns were even more common.

To the "startup time discussion" point, though, I think the current
discussions are a mixture of debating with history (ala "we use vi because
emacs is giant and slow"), people switching contexts frequently (rather
than reusing the same session on the same machines most of the time, also
exemplified in the people who use TTY emacs in gui sessions rather than
display-juggling and/or tramp; especially common among people using
containers, VMs, etc), and people who fall into the trap created by the
default use pattern starting new emacsen rather than reusing an existing
one. A small percentage of them end up restarting emacs frequently because
they frequently rebuild it -- something that I know is too painful for you,
Stefan, and Richard to do often, but that I see happening several times a
week.

Put another way, I think you've identified a symptom of the problem that
the change is intended to fix. Many (most?) of the people I talk to in that
situation are pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a
not-so-complicated way to fix it. For example, I have personally talked to
multiple people with complicated AppleScript setups designed to fix this
problem, and generally made them happy and occasionally chagrined when I
tell them that what they now want is 'emacsclient -c -a ""'.

~Chad

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