Re: adding a standard font-lock-number-face

[Donald Ephraim Curtis <dcurtis@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I was originally the person that brought this to Fabian's attention, and so it was my "complaint".  But he's more-correct in that it's not a "complaint" as much as something I like.  

There are numerous posts elsewhere where people have fixed this issue by adding some elisp to their personal configs; i will not fill this thread with links to prove the point.  I currently do this in my configuration file.  Performance doesn't seem to be an issue.  As well, there are plenty of other editors (whose authors are developers themselves) that also must find this useful; since they include this highlighting.  This doesn't mean Emacs should go jump off a bridge (because their friends are doing it).

I don't understand why syntax highlighting has to *only* signify structure.  More important is to help me (the user/developer) navigating the code.  I personally find highlighting numbers does help me navigate code; especially in debugging.\b  Highlighting should be useful over being "technically consistent".

Regardless of opinions, limiting the available faces limits theme designers and ultimately limits the user.  The default can always be to inherit the default-face.  At least then there is a face for this type of thing that modes and themes can use.  

This is just an opportunity for Emacs to include some better (i.e., expected, standard, common, etc.) defaults.  Maybe that's not the point, but everytime it takes me an hour or more – because i'm a newb – to do something I think should be really simple, I'm a bit annoyed.  So then I think, maybe I could fix this for future generations.  And here we are.


argument against myself: it's easy to add into your personal config so no big deal.

--
Donald Ephraim Curtis
dcurtis@milkbox.net




On Jun 17, 2011, at 10:14, Fabian Ezequiel Gallina wrote:

> 2011/6/17 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>:
>>> An argument I can think of for inclusion is that it seems highlighting
>>> those kind of stuff (event operators) is really common on other
>>> editors, so it is acceptable that people coming from other places
>>> would expect this kind of stuff highlighted out-of-the-box.  I know the
>> 
>> I haven't seen many complaints about it either in emacs-devel or
>> gnu-emacs-help, so I don't think it makes much difference.  People do
>> not expect one editor to behave exactly like another.
>> 
> 
> Think of it of as a feature request, not a problem. I think it might
> be good to have some way to define those kind of *extra* fancy stuff
> and standardize them (even if not enabled by default). In my opinion,
> that will likely help also to improve things avoiding the creation of
> new non standard faces in external packages.
> 
> Even when I'm writing that, I feel we could also define a set standard
> faces for package developers to use in their special modes. I guess
> this can be the start of more complete font-locking framework that
> could lead to help Emacs to be simple to theme, avoiding the need to
> define a hundred faces to make themes work OK with your custom
> packages.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Fabián E. Gallina
>