Re: VOTE: Changing completions-common-part face's default

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2019 00:24:06 +0000
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>,
>  Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>, emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 11:38 PM Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:
> 
> > Important for the completion style author mostly, though. It's not like
> > a regular user could do something about it. Isn't that right?
> 
> Not at all, no. I was using flex before I became an author of a
> flex method and I liked it. I cant unbecome an author of a flex
> method.
> 
> I'm 100% with Drew here (thou not so scientific).  I use flex (before
> and after flex in Emacs proper) to explore a namespace of symbols.  I
> work in an application that has may thousands of very long CL symbols.
> In these symbols, some words appear inconsistently, middle, end or
> beginning, depending on the "era" they were created (this is a system
> as old as Emacs, by the way, dates to the 80's).
> 
> One of the main use cases I have for the highlighting is to
> input that keyword to see what "era" symbol I want.  I don't know
> the symbol I want until I start seeing the large list. Then I add another
> little sub-concept word to narrow down, and repeat. Flex helps
> me explore. I wish I could share with you the function names
> I have to work with, but as you can understand, I can't.

It is OK to have special needs, and it is OK to program Emacs to cater
to those special needs.  That's why Emacs has minor modes and user
options.

But the important part is to recognize these special needs as such.
It's your and Drew's insistence on making that the default is what at
least I object to, and I think so does Dmitry.  Even if you or someone
else want Emacs to always behave like that, they are still special
needs, in this case special to your usage patterns.

Let's agree to disagree about the importance of the feature you want
to see by default.  The Emacs way of agreeing to disagree is to have
an opt-in feature; it can later become the default if enough users
tell they want it.