Re: ns-win.el

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:42:00 -0400 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: 

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
>> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:08:16 -0500
>> 
>> What if the "native" look is optional and off by default?

EZ> That'd be fine, IMO.  We do that elsewhere.  For example, ls-lisp.el
EZ> has a few options whose non-default values make Dired behave like
EZ> Windows file managers do.
On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:27:33 -0400 Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> wrote: 

SM> I think it's usually good to have Emacs follow the platform guidelines.
SM> It's also good to have Emacs be consistent across platforms.  So there's
SM> sometimes a tension here.  Moving the Spell menu seems like a good
SM> decision in this case.  Maybe we could even resolve this difference by
SM> moving the Spell menu for all the platforms (this is a very weak
SM> suggestion: I rarely if ever use the menus, so I have no idea what would
SM> be a good change in this respect).

My suggestion (specifically on MacOS X, where user preferences are saved
in a consistent way and associated with the user account) is to ask once
on startup "do you want the native or the standard look?"

Then set a preference key accordingly and never ask the question again
as long as that key exists (but allow changing it in the Preferences
dialog).  Changing the value only takes effect on restart.

This is IMHO the best compromise to improve usability for everyone on
the Mac OS X platform.

Ted