Re: GUI X-FreeDesktop integration

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 6:04 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > So, we can say that users who mostly launch things by clicking on icons
> in their desktops will be likely to expect things to work this way.
> Conversely, it seems reasonable to worry less about catering for people who
> do not have this expectation, because we can infer that they rarely click
> on the icons.
>
> I don't see how you can make that conclusion with such certainty.  Not
> all the applications behave in that way, so it's quite possible that
> people don't expect every application to do it.  Thus, it isn't a
> catastrophe that Emacs behaves like it does, and like it did until
> now.
>

My experience with a spread of users who use gui launchers of this sort is
that they expect exactly what Peter suggested, and find the current
behavior to be obviously broken. I mention this because that feedback is
uniform, to the point that people pass around their own home-grown versions
of the change suggested here, and they uniformly replace the emacs gui
launcher entry, rather than supplement it. Multiple times, I have seen this
exchange prompted by a feelign of disbelief that emacs "still can't open
new windows instead", followed by the home-grown alternatives. Another
common variant is people claiming that Emacs is "incompatible" with gui
launchers, with a similar "it can, but you have to fix the defaults" reply.
Of course, this is all anecdotal, and it's a little old at this point as
I've had very little exposure to a wide user-base in the past
year-point-five, but I suggest that this is a good use of the "try it for a
while and see" strategy rather than the "ultra-conservative" approach. To
be more specific, it seems pretty easy to make the standard behavior the
default, and include an option that retains emacs's older behavior, and see
which the distros prefer. We could also try asking them directly, if we
think we have enough contacts there.

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.

Hope that helps,
~Chad

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