Re: What is the _essential_ difference between lazy-lock and jit-lock?

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: Alan Mackenzie<none@example.invalid>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 22:34:59 +0000
> 
> > I think these problems were solved in the meantime (IIRC, they were due
> > to bad interaction between JIT lock and font-lock definitions for some
> > modes).
> 
> Any chance of a revision number (presumably of jit-lock.el) where this
> was fixed?

Sorry, no.  And the changes were not in jit-lock.el per se, IIRC, but
rather in the font-lock definitions of several modes.

> > I have a better idea of a user interface:
> 
> >         (font-lock-tune-font-lock 'my-specific-preferences)
> > or
> > 	(font-lock-tune-font-lock 'my-favorite-computer)
> 
> > Seriously, though: that's the first time I hear an Emacs veteran
> > complain about too many customization options.  Surely, you should
> > know that they all exist for a good purpose.
> 
> I wasn't meaning to suggest that they should be removed.  Merely that
> they should be supplemented with a more handy higher level tool, leaving
> the individual options available for specific needs/wants.

I was only semi-humorous when I suggested that Emacs should itself
know about my own preferences.  If we could have that, it would be a
great UI.

However, in practice, this is next to impossible, and so, IMHO, is
your suggestion.  In the specific case in point, that of tuning JIT
lock, too many factors are specific to the peculiarities of the
individual setup of the machine on which it runs.

Instead of wasting effort to invent a tool that will certainly fail in
a large proportion of cases, Emacs lets you tune the feature with a
set of settings.  The documentation of those settings should make it
clear which ones to use in each particular case.  Perhaps if you could
describe the process that you went through when you tried to figure
out what options to change, we could identify what needs to be
improved in the documentation, or perhaps how to change the set of the
options itself.