Re: customize

[Edward Welbourne <eddy@opera.no>]

> What does (custom-set-faces '(trailing-whitespace ((t nil)))) do?
> What is it supposed to do?

it is supposed to configure the trailing-whitespace face, activated by
setting show-trailing-whitespace to a non-nil value; however, it sets
the face to always have no attributes set.  This appears consistent
with what it *does*: the face is just ordinary background, making the
trailing hspace (which, for me, is actually blackspace, not
whitespace; I use reverse-video systematically) invisible despite
being `shown'.  This is perfectly correct behaviour.

I just didn't want this code in my .emacs, after the point where my
.emacs loads my .sys/elisp/init.el which configures the face using
set-face-background (and doesn't contain any dire warnings about not
editing this other than via the appropriate wizard; I can edit the
color name, evaluate the expression, see if I like it, etc. until I
like it, then byte compile the file and *know*, as opposed to hoping,
that it'll Do What I Want; which is currently grey18).

> What settings did you specify in customize for that face?
This'll have to wait until I'm not in the middle of a session with
lots of saved state: I am *not* going to play with customize except in
a session I'm happy to abort shortly afterwards (because this is what
I've *always* had to do shortly after using customize), but roughly
speaking: I went to the config section for trailing whitespace and
unchecked the check-box for the background colour specification of the
face, then saved the configuration.

The customize behaviour here is to configure the face to be invisible,
rather than to remove the configuration of that face from my .emacs
file.  If this is what customize is meant to do in this case, please
could we have a control on the GUI that says `customize back off here
and say nothing about this face' for use by those who want to do this
via our own elisp.

> You said "turning off the configuration option for it"; what does
> "it" refer to here, and which option is that?
"it" was the face, trailing-whitespace.

For details of which option that was in the GUI, see above on my
reticence about firing up customize just to find out how it described
the face.  It may be a while before I get such a break - I am busy and
emacs is generally so well behaved I don't have to exit it other than
on the rare occasions my Debian GNU/Linux box needs rebooted.  But
when I do take such a break, I'll dig through these e-mails answering
lots of questions.

		Eddy.