Re: Aquamacs distro for OS X like behavior

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> If possible, I would very much like to see that Emacs /allows/ us
>> to customize its UI for a particular environment.
>
> I think we all agree about it.
>
> The mainstream Emacs will never be like the one you distribute
> because an important consideration for it is that it should behave
> like Emacs on other platforms, as opposed to your distribution which
> places more emphasis on having it behave like other apps on Mac OS
> X.

There is considerable leeway in those goals.  For example, different
file selection dialogs and similar are quite common, and in fact, the
whole widgetry stuff (like customize and co) could be made to make use
of the native widgets where available.

Emacs already tends to blend quite better with its environment than
XEmacs does (which looks like, well, XEmacs everywhere), and this is
not a mistake, in my opinion.

> But it's still a good goal to try and minimize the difference
> between the two.  At least, to the point where your distribution is
> not a full Emacs install but only an add-on.  An important
> consideration here is that the same Emacs install should be able to
> accomodate users who want MacOSX behavior and users who want Emacs
> behavior.

Well, we do have something like customization themes IIRC, but I don't
know their extent and how they are used.  If a whole set of defaults
were to be changed by a single theme (and could be changed back at
will), then an out-of-the-box configuration that was different on
MacOSX would be quite tolerable.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum