Re: RFC: Flavors - naming significant sets of customizations

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

> Has anyone already come up with a name for large
> customizations?  I've noticed a number of efforts to
> significantly customize Emacs in a way that other
> people can readily use.  The first term that came to
> mind was "flavor", as it seems to largely be a matter
> of taste.

It can be a matter of taste but it can also be a matter
of necessity. At a "middle level" it can be a matter of
severely increasing your productivity. At an "attitude
level" it is about being serious about one of the most
important things in all activity: the human-tool
coordination and interaction ("interface", I guess, but
a dynamic one).

"Theme" and "skin" do it an injustice, as at least my
associations of those words is that it is a matter of
"look and feel" only. Remember the winamp mp3 player?
It had skins (or "skinz", x0 x0). Java applications
have themes: if you juggle with the
jar-files/classpath, extract the main class, download
the themes (often many, as they inherit from each
other), set the look and feel option - and then, you
are almost done! Customizing and programming Emacs is
on a whole other level. I don't want to be associated
with that kind of lunacy.

That Emacs in general should not be customized/extended
is *radical*, this is the property of Emacs that is
always emphasized, and people always say "I wish it was
like in Emacs" when they use other applications and
stumble upon something they don't like: "... then I
could just fix it instantly!"

However, you should not get stuck in it. But if you do,
it is not the worst place to get stuck in. Every
minimal change I do to Emacs is something I immediately
benefit from, no matter how little. Compare this to all
guys who get stuck in their "MMORPG" projects that will
never be done anyway, and from which whatever knowledge
that is nevertheless gained is very difficult to apply
anywhere else.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573