Re: emacs mode line suggestions

[Ian Eure <ian@digg.com>]

On Nov 15, 2008, at 5:54 PM, Xah wrote:

> On Nov 15, 1:23 am, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> From:Xah<xah...@gmail.com>
>>> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:18:31 -0800 (PST)
>>>
>>> • clicking on the file name should not switch buffer.
>>
>> That's not the file name, that's the buffer name.
>
> please get the over all picture, not bone picking.
>
>> As for what it should do, I don't see why your preference is better
>> than the current one.  Popping a menu requires another click to
>> actually select a buffer, whereas the current behavior does it in one
>> click.
>
> typically, a user has several user buffers open, and as far as i guess
> many programers who use emacs extensively has like hundreds of buffers
> open. Cycling them one by one is not much useful.
>
> Counting emacs's own buffers, those info, messages, scratch,
> completions, grep output, shell output, C-h f and friends output,
> dictionary lookup output, ispell output, man page output ... etc...
> these are typically looked once and not useful afterwards. Switching
> and cycling thru them are not much useful.
I basically agree with this stuff. I doubt many hardcore Emacs users  
choose to switch buffers this way, which requires using the mouse. And  
the part of the behavior that is least useful is that the switch is  
blind - you don't know what buffer you're going to get unless you know  
the current state of the buffer-list.

My objection is to the idea that you don't want star buffers in the  
list. These are also used for interaction with external processes:  
*ssh: host*, *SQL: foo*, *Twit-recent*, *compilation*, *shell*,  
*Python*. It seems ill advised to exclude those from the list.


> • Minor mode should not be displayed in mode line. It's confusing. For
> one reason, it by default selectively display only some of the minor
> modes currently on, and the selective process is not something people
> who intuitively understands. For the other reason, Emacs's technical
> concept of Minor mode is somewhat confusing. Most minor modes in
> practice are Preferences settings (Mac-speak) or Options (Windows-
> speak and Linux Desktops) from user point of view.
>
Where would you suggest showing this information? Some minor modes  
change Emacs' behavior significantly. For example: auto-fill-mode or  
abbrev-mode. If these aren't in the mode line, where do you find this  
information?



>>> • Clicking on the major mode name should pop up a contextual menu to
>>> let user switch to major major modes.
>>
>> Switching a major mode is a very rare command, so having this at your
>> fingertips makes no sense, IMO.
>
> switching between modes is not rarely used. I'd estimate it is used
> every other hour at least.
>
Can you describe the use case where you do this? It sounds like you  
have a configuration issue, honestly.

I think the only time I manually switch modes is when I need to use  
*scratch* for something, e.g. I'll switch to emacs-lisp-mode if I want  
to eval some code, sql-mode if I want to write a query, etc.

I should probably write some functions to give me *lisp* and *SQL*  
buffers with the appropriate mode.

  - Ian