Re: theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired)

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 7 Jul 2005, at 11:53, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:

> Historically, the Emacs community has provided default behavior
> that catered to its entrenched userbase.  The answer to nearly
> any suggestion that such behavior might be awkward / unfamiliar /
> jarring to new users, especially those on platforms held in low
> regard by the entrenched userbase, is that Emacs is customizable.
> Essentially a "Let them eat cake" attitude.

One possibility to address this is to develop 'distributions'. Just  
like, say, SUSE Linux offers a GNU/Linux OS with a whole lot of  
customization and integration, you can distribute Emacs with such  
customizations. That's what I am doing with Aquamacs Emacs, where we  
can radically change the behavior in order to make it consistent with  
GUI based operating systems.

> My notion of a theme is not a named collection of configuration
> settings.  Rather it is an expression of high-level intent:
> - as much as possible behave like Window / MacOS / *nix
> - underline clickable links
> - give me single frame behavior vs something like Drew's OneOnOne

Well, these would be examples of what I would understand as 'themes'.

I have implemented the single frame behavior (it takes more than  
OneonOne to do that), for example.
And if I understand correctly what themes are supposed to do, I  
cannot but agree with you that the currently planned collections of  
customization settings won't do the job for efforts to change the  
user interface (point 2 below). Themes make some headway though  
(point 1):

1. Aquamacs changes a lot of default customization settings, and it  
also ensures that the user's actual customizations are noted as such  
and saved - by setting the 'standard-value property whenever a  
customization variable is set. That way we ensure that the user can  
still customize whatever - it's just the defaults that are changed. A  
lot of hooks are used, but they could be handled as customization  
variables.
Making this process a bit easier, making it easier for the user to  
undo some of these new 'defaults'  by defining groups of  
customizations in themes would certainly be desirable.

2. However, over the last two or three months or so, Aquamacs has  
come to do much more than that. It blatantly redefines and advises  
functions, something which can only be undone by means of extra  
customization variables that are checked by the new functions. In  
addition to that, we patch the c core and one or two of the .el files  
in order to either implement needed additional functionality or (on  
the Carbon port side) to modify functionality. In addition to that,  
several support files in the original package are modified, others  
added (converted manuals). [I make an effort to contribute changes,  
in particular bugfixes, where I see fit - it's not a competing fork.]

CONCLUSION:
We cannot realize your points with collections of customization  
settings. The changes are much more profound.
Therefore, there is another consideration that becomes more important:
Makers of a distribution like Aquamacs would really need a stable,  
relatively bug-free release. We're shooting at a moving target  
otherwise.