Re: Change terminology to better align users’ experience with modern GUIs

[MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com>]

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
>
>
>