From: MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com>
To: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Change terminology to better align users’ experience with modern GUIs
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 09:11:00 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <7676de90-f488-93c6-1da9-b2d2d0d4fcb5@arlsoft.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <jwvv9vsrk8m.fsf-monnier+emacs@gnu.org>
I see this as the Emacs equivalent to the efforts to get the U.S. to
switch from the English system of measurement to the Metric system. And
we all know how well that has gone.
Once a community has been using core terminology for an extended period
of time, the only way to change it is to completely replace the members
of the community. And doing that would kill Emacs itself, which would
make the notion of changing the terminology irrelevant.
Mark Rosenthal
On 7/23/19 9:00 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> IMO in my ideal world, there should be no division between `window' and
>>> `buffer', the difference should be abstracted away so that users don’t
>>> have to know the `window' notion at all.
>> I don't see how that would even be possible.
> Indeed. A given window can show display different buffers at different
> times, and a buffer can be displayed in any number of buffers at any one
> time, so the two are really quite different.
>
>>> Changing the `window' term to `pane' or something else seems like
>>> a low-hanging fruit for people who would like to try using Emacs; I’m
>>> interested/curious on other people’s opinions about this.
>> This could be helpful, but there are a *lot* of function names using
>> 'window'. That means adding a lot of aliases for backwards
>> compatibility.
> Yes, we discussed doing such a change a few years back (renaming window
> to pane, and then renaming frame to window), but since those names
> appear as part of functions's and variables's names, it implies
> a massive renaming. In order not to break external packages and users's
> configs, the old names would still have to be preserved as aliases for
> many years (meaning that there would need to be many years between the
> renaming of windows to panes and the subsequent renaming of frames to
> windows).
>
> I think "many years" above can be estimated at about of 10 years (there
> are still several important packages which consider it important to
> be compatible with Emacs<23 and Emacs-23 was released 10 years ago).
>
> So the way I see it, we're talking about 20 years of transition.
> That makes "pane" rhyme with "pain".
>
>
> Stefan
>
>
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-07-23 13:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-07-23 6:46 Change terminology to better align users’ experience with modern GUIs 조성빈
2019-07-23 9:37 ` Jean Louis
2019-07-23 10:13 ` 조성빈
2019-07-23 17:03 ` Gerhard Wolfstieg
2019-07-23 19:17 ` tomas
2019-07-23 22:12 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-07-23 10:44 ` tomas
2019-07-23 14:43 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-07-23 16:15 ` tomas
2019-07-23 16:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-08-03 17:37 ` Emanuel Berg
2019-08-01 1:53 ` Emanuel Berg
2019-07-23 11:38 ` Noam Postavsky
2019-07-23 13:00 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-07-23 13:11 ` MBR [this message]
2019-07-23 13:40 ` tomas
2019-07-23 13:46 ` Noam Postavsky
2019-07-23 13:59 ` tomas
2019-07-23 14:38 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-08-03 17:12 ` Emanuel Berg
2019-08-01 1:55 ` Emanuel Berg
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=7676de90-f488-93c6-1da9-b2d2d0d4fcb5@arlsoft.com \
--to=mbr@arlsoft.com \
--cc=help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org \
--cc=monnier@iro.umontreal.ca \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this external index
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.