Re: Customizing key bindings (was: Re: [CVS] f7, f8 bound..)

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 01:28:30PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> >         M-x customize-option <ret> global-key-bindings <ret>
>>> 
>>> I must say I really dislike the idea of customizing
>>> `global-key-bindings' when I actually want to change `global-map'.
>>
>> Agreed.  Customize should be a friendly face for the existing infrastructure,
>> not a distant relative...
>
> Emacs will never be easy to customize, then.

Maybe I should elaborate...

The problem isn't global-key-bindings, it can easily be named
"global-map" with no loss of functionality.

The problem is the mindset that making complex applications written by
programmers for programmers easy to configure, is simply a matter of
providing a "friendly" interface to the existing configuration
mechanisms.  This mindset is shared by most traditional Unix
developers (and probably Lisp developers too, but who cares).

However, this assumes that being "easy to configure" is merely a
matter of "syntactical sugar", that is, provide a form based interface
to the old text based configuration files.  

What it really does is to force users to think like programmers, which
of course is a lot easier to the programmer than having programmers
think like users.

Note: Here I use "user" to mean the kind of end-users who would never
become programmers, or edit a configuration file directly.  I know
programmers are users too, and even can benefit a form based
customization interface, but they are not the kind of users who really
*need* such an interface,

If you want to make configuration easy to the end-users, you need to
start with their needs, and not with the old textual configuration
files.  It is one area where MS Windows and Mac programmers tend to be
better than Unix programmers.